Halcyon Summer Days

Dear Blog Readers,

Sorry for the delay in getting a blog up in awhile. 

…Visitors from afar

… A road trip to Dunedin 

… And a wifi issue 

 held up the blogger! 

So what have we been up to these halcyon summer days of January and early February?

We have been following Ed Abbey's advice and "not burning ourselves out!" What follows are a few of my favorite Ed Abbey quotes and a photo gallery of some of our wanderings, pleasures, and adventures while also contemplating the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space of the South Island of  New Zealand.

Wine tasting at Rippon Winery

Exquisite views from the Rippon Winery

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for awhile and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive." -Ed Abbey

Clutha River walk

Mt. Iron walk

“There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus, it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated. … To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever if you ask me.” -Ed Abbey

Enjoying an adult refreshment at the Cardrona Pub.

Cup of flat white at our favorite Wanaka cafe, Florences.

Needless to say, we have been enjoying ourselves and keeping our bodies active and alive. 

While we can.

“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” 

-Ed Abbey

Cheers,

Mary and Bob