A little photo show for Allen......some photos not

Ken Fitzgerald said:

Garry,

Late January to early February would be my preference to see the winter scenery. There are some really nice places to stay in West Yellowstone, MT. Nice motels with attached restaurants. The tours will pick you up at your motel. The tours are not that expensive. There are several. My wife raised a flatlander, hates winter travel. She was with me on this trip and her only regret was we couldn't stay a couple more days to take all 3 of the major tours. Our day long tour in the snowcoach (a transformer really..it's tour bus in the summer) was $95 per person IIRC. That didn't include lunch. It was a full 9 hours long and the drivers are as much tour guides as drivers. We learned a lot on the tour! The snow coaches are comfortable.

Click to expand...

I have added this to my bucket list - it's only a days drive from my home!

NZ...is group of islands. We hot air ballooned in the very early morning before the wind came up. That afternoon my friends wife took Sharon shopping. For an anniversary gift, she hired a flyfishing guide to take me flyfishing. He hung two and couldn't land them. I hung two and couldn't land them. The casting was atrocious as the average windspeed that afternoon was 13 mph with gusts into the 20's. No photos.

The next day......day long trip to whale watch.


So use your eagle eyes. Can you see the seals in this photo?



Here's the best of the whale photos...


Over half the tourists got seasick going back into land. We were 20 miles out to see this one whale. We had a 1030 boat. They canceled the rest of the days scheduled trips as it got too rough.....

So Christmas morning we flew from Christchurch to Queenstown. If you can only visit one place in NZ....friends this is it IMHO..and in Sharon's opinion too!

A sleepy little town sitting the sidehill of a mountain....on the edge of a glacial cut lake. The Remarkables Mountain ranges surrounds it. If you happen to have seen the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy..filmed in the Remarkables.....

For Sharon's anniversary present....a helicopter ride.......over one mountain to the top of another mountain....sit down....leave it running ...everybody get's out for 10 minutes of photographing.....back in and back to town....gorgeous...gorgeous town.....

Great pics, Ken. I'd love to see New Zealand. That's quite the basket on the balloon you flew on. Lotta capacity, and I'll bet the envelope was huge, too. I crewed for a while on a 'cattle car' balloon like that back in Albuquerque. It was a handful.

Here one of my favorite balloon pics...taken by my sister while in Switzerland with the pilot/owner and his wife.



And another view of the church, taken by my brother-in-law at about the same time...



Allen, the rainbow was real. I just caught it one late morning on my way to work.

Vaughn....that polar bear balloon it is as cool as it comes!

Okay....

How about some photos from the desert southwest...near 4 Corners?



Here is one taken at the Cortez CO cultural center:




And the next day at Mesa Verde

Ken,
I've done a lot of shipping into and out of Christchurch, NZ.. Actually met a fellow shipping agent from Christchurch at a sales seminar in London back in '81... I have his business card stashed away in my collection somewhere... over the 40 years I was in the business I collected several hundred or maybe thousand business cards from around the world... I think these are some of the first pictures of the town I've actually seen. Tks for posting.

Chuck....I'll post a few of Christchurch. It's an old town with some really well kept older buildings built on more of a European design. We were there for 3 days and nights. We spent all but the last night, Christmas Eve, with Ken and Anne. Christmas Eve was our anniversary and the hotel where we were staying gave us an anniversary present of dinner for two and drinks on them.....$80/person....on them. I found the Kiwis a refreshingly friendly people and I will return...on my own dime the next time.

Now folks....those Kiwis know how to take things up a notch or two and they will have fun doing it! Count on it! Bet on it! It's a sure thing!

We have several jetboat manufacturers here in Lewiston. The boats built here have been bought and shipped as far away as Nepal. The boats here are aluminum....and often will have big block Ford or Chevy engines some times multiple engines....the ones used in Nepal were dual diesels.

Well those Kiwis....use fiberglass boats ...........use Buick engines.....dual V-6's ...turbo charged for a total of 560 hp...........Yowsah!

My blue mountain parka gives me away. It's double-layered Goretex.....

Jet boating on the Shotover River...Queenstown...At times at 45 MPH skidding sideways through a narrow rock canyon.....12 inches of clearance in front ....24 inches in back.....skidding sideways....when you get to the wide parts.....360-540º turning skids! Yes...boys and girls can you spell adrenaline?

Back to 4 Corners....

This first one........Monument Valley....do you recognize it? It's been in a lot of John Wayne/John Ford directed movies......Thelma and Louise......Clint Eastwood's Eiger Sanction......




The 2nd photo I throw in for sentimental and historical reasons......at the Cortez Colorado Cultural Center ...they had an Indian family dancing....and then they had one of the Navajo Code Talkers from WWII. We were on vacation together with Sharon's parents. Imagine the surprise on my FILs face...when in talking with this Navajo Veteran...this Navajo Code Talker.....he discovered they'd fought on GuadalCanal at the same time.

I give you 2 WWII veterans..........

Back to NZ....At Queenstown.....My anniversary present to Sharon....a helicopter ride......that's where the earlier photos of the town were taken from......I was surprised how cheap entertainment was. This cost me $250 NZ for the 2 of us...at the time that was about $140 US.

So it was us...another couple and the pilot. We landed on a mountain top...took photos of the scenery and us and then back to town.


Their bus dropped us off at the bottom of a gondola ride in town and we rode to the top of another mountain. In the summer, the ski resort at the top is turned into a mall and restaurant. We had dinner with 200 of our closest friends we'd never met before. Dinner was an international buffet...with a European steam table...an Asian steam table and a desert bar. The food was incredible. Later as we left they were starting a show at the Mauri Cultural theatre. We entered and watched the show. When they came up into the audience looking for volunteers...I pushed Sharon out. I'm bigger than she! Some Mauri ladies/dancers spent 10 minutes teaching the group on stage some Mauri words and a dance routine. There was complete shock on eveybody's face when the music started and Sharon found herself on stage with 11 of her closest friends dancing the "Hokey Pokey" with members of the Mauri trible. Sharon is at the far right.


Sharon and 2 Mauri tribe members:

Surely....I'm not the only one with a camera!


Help me out here!

Great pics, Ken. The jet boats look like a lot of fun. Thanks for the pics. (Who's the old guy hittin' on that nice lady by the helicopter? The pilot?)

OK folks, this is the picture show for Allen so he has something to look at other than what he sees at home. Let's see some other outdoor shots that aren't from Long Island. He's in the hospital with nothing more than a laptop and grouchy nurses to keep him occupied. As Ken said, surely there are other pics out there.

Ken, I ain't laid up in no hospital, but sure enjoyed the show!!!!! I realize those are beautiful places, but your photos capture them with a detail I have never had the ability to do. Thank you very much.
Allen, I think that table they slide over your bed will hold a JET mini! Get to feeling better.

Okay.....So......on the south Island is a little place called the Milford Sound....should be called the Milford Fijord as it was glacially cut......

12 hour trip...4 by bus...4 by boat.....4 by bus......a couple short stops on the bus portion.....Rudyard Kipling called the Milford Sound the 8th Wonder of the World.....

Thin topsoil on these steep mountains...a little rain leads to tree-slides...... a little rain leads to waterfalls everywhere it seems....lots of waterfalls....hundreds of waterfalls.....

Check some of this out.....

And now for the boat part.......Milford Sound.....spooky.....stunning....and the last photo....check it out. The ship we were on...the captain saying while it's not unusual for a pod of dolfins to chase a boat into the fijord...it is unusual for one with a baby to chase it in...check it out....

Okay....we flew to the north Island....went to a Mauri cultural center for dinner and show at the town of Rotorua....this was a real Mauri hangi...where the food is cooked in a pit. It was wonderful....excellent show......a village built in the same manner they were 500 years ago....saw some woodworking.....guy making their equivalent of a totem pole......

That evening I captured this sunset.........



Gotta go to work. Have a great day Allen!

thanx for the pics, one day Id like to travel again.

OK, you are on, I've got to switch computers.........

In June 2006, I went to Austria, it was a very long flight, but I just fell in love with the country, it is very beautiful, and we met a lot of very nice people, and drank a lot of very good wine!


Some pics that I took I just snapped them out of the bus window, I'm not even sure what it was, but it looked good........


Now this was a winery, a very old one, family business and they had a very long tradition of making wine.


Some views from the winery and the surrounding area, the castle on the top of the hill is very old, and not occupied, but they had done some excavating there and they found Roman ruins on site, the sense of history in the place was very real.


These I just found to be very interesting shutters, they open and close in a variety of ways, which makes them not only nice to look at but functional


a side street in a small village, we stopped to take pics along the way. On average we went to 5 wineries a day, a lot and boy were we tired, we left the hotel at or before 8 AM and did not get back to the hotel before midnight for six glorious days


Most of the wineries had cellars deep under the ground, this one had kind of a "Haunted Dinner" set up for fun


Some of the large barrels had very nice carvings on them, these were done to commemorate some special occasion, a wedding or birth for example


Some of my fellow tour members, they were all Japanese of course, and they Austrian people kept turning to me, and speaking Austrian, thinking I was one of them, a tour guide, I got to blow their minds by saying, "No, I'm from Japan "

More tomorrow, sorry, but it is late here.

Cheers!

PS, Allen, check your PMs