Written on December 16, 2008

Rotorua is an interesting place in many respects. All the travel brochures say, you will smell Rotorua before you will ever see it. Rotorua is one of the largest active geothermal sites on the planet. As such, there is a very strong smell of sulfur in the air. In fact, when we checked into our hotel room, the room smelled musty and somewhat moldy. I was told that it comes from the sulfur, over time. The room looked to be spotless. So if Rotorua stinks so much, why is it a big place to visit for not only tourists, but New Zealanders as well? In a word, spas. They have some of the best spas in the world. This little smelly town has taken a negative and turned it into a big positive by boasting the spas and really taking advantage of the one thing that they have, all that heat that comes from being on an active geothermal area. In fact, there is a place that people go where they can dig down a few inches into the sand, and lay in the sand. The heat from the earth will basically give you a heated spa treatment right there. You have to be a bit careful where you dig and lay. If you pick the wrong spot you could end up with burns. The earth, after all, doesn't really have a thermostat to our liking.

We opted not to take a spa treatment, but rather spend our time taking the three mile hike around the most active thermal area, called Wai-O-Tapo, Thermal Wonderland. This was a land of sink holes, boiling mud, steaming pools of water emitting strong sulfur fumes, geysers, and pools of boiling crude oil with mud. Still, fascinating to see.

Here are are few of the photos from that area. The water really is the color presented. It comes from a variety of minerals from the earth. Just remember as you look at these photos, there were times where I could hardly breath due to the intense smell of sulfur in the air. It would really take your breath away. But as you can see, it had it's own kind of beauty about it. Everything has something to offer.

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The Champagne Pool

Devil's Bath

The Champagne Pool

Lake Ngakoro

Boiling mud

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And finally, the track of the three mile walk around the preserve. Not that if you are receiving this via email, the track will not work. You will have to view the entry on the website to see this work.

While Kent was lecturing in Auckland, I decided to take two days and travel up to the Bay of Islands, a four hour drive north from Auckland. This is up in the small town of Paihia. It was one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited. The weather was not optimal for photos, but the scenery was just unbelievable. And on my last day, the weather was clearing off.

The first day, I looked around the charming little town of Paihia. I also took a short boat ride over to the town of Russell. In the days of whaling, it was the city the fishermen liked to visit because it was the home of over 30 brothels and other places of "ill repute". But, it was a favorite for the sailors because it was the home of prostitutes, pimps and escaped convicts from Australia. It was dubbed "The Hell Hole of the South Pacific". Today, it is a quiet little town and quite respectable.

A few photos from those two days...

The painted face at the end of the Maori War Canoe

The very famous Hole in the Rock Island

One of the shore streets in Russell. The Gables (on the right), now a restaurant, is one of the last standing buildings that used to be a brothel.

Otehei Bay, where we stopped for lunch

And the complete track from the two days, starting out from Auckland, and the Bay of Islands Tour...

We've been going like crazy. We spend a day or two in each place, but during the day, we take hikes, or tours of different things. So when we finally get back to the room, there are two things on our mind: taking a shower and going to bed. NOT blogging!

But today, it's rainy out and I didn't feel like putting the rain gear on and forging through a wet forest. So I decided to take some time off (like a vacation) and sit in one of the three lobbies of this huge resort hotel, and write a bit.

So far, we've been to Auckland, Rotorua, Lake Taupo, and are now staying in the Tongariro National Park. Every location if very different. Auckland is a nice city, as far as cities go. I posted a few photos of the city here, but here are a few...

Auckland Harbor on our way to Waiheke Island

Waiheke Island

Auckland Sky Tower from our hotel room

Here's the track that we took on our way to Waiheke Island

Kent emailed me a few photos he took while exploring around the Cape Town area. This is what he sent.

And a few more...

This maps out the hike drive they took today, along with the photos along the way...

I'm finally getting through these photos. That darn work stuff just got in the way. Work is really an inconvenience at times! Anyway, below you will find the tracking for the photos for that day, followed by a couple of photos to entice you to visit the album itself on Flickr.

We took a really nice canoe trip yesterday down the Housatonic River in western Connecticut (and a tiny bit of Massachusetts). We drove to Clarke Outdoors in West Cornwall, CT. The total length of the canoe trip, according to our GPS, was 9.3 miles.

The section of the Housatonic we were on was very placid for the most part - only one small rapid. Normally, they would drop us off downriver, but because it’s been so dry, water levels were too low in that part of the river. Instead, they took us up-river, above the dam. We had a great time, and the weather, even though a little warm, was nice.

It’s still a little early for fall colors, and because it’s been so dry, they may not be very good this year. We stopped for dinner at a Bertucci’s in Canton, and collapsed when we got home. We are still a little tired and sore today, but we had a great time and it was still a really nice day.

Here are a few photos from the trip. Feel free to view the full photo set.

Bill, just after we had lunch

Google interactive map with GPS tracking. Your browser must support iframes for this to work!

This is from the trip we took yesterday to Chatfield Hollow State Park. It’s located in the little town of Killingworth, Connecticut. It was a really nice day and especially nice to have some time to just be with each other. I've had a cold lately and haven’t felt like doing much. This was the first day I felt decent in awhile.

I haven’t posted for awhile. There’s a lot going on in my life right now. I’ll post about it if I feel like I want to vent. For now, I’m just happy that things are looking up for me personally and that I’m getting back to one of my passions; photography.

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View entire album

Elevation Profile of trip

I love Fall. The air is so crisp and clean. There’s a slight chill in the air in the morning and everything seems so cheerful and care free. And then you go to work... but that’s another issue. :-)

Yeah I know, it’s not technically Fall yet. But try telling that to my trees outside. They are getting in full swing. We are going to try something a bit different this year for viewing the Fall colors. We are going to take a canoe trip and view them from a river. I’ll probably pack a lunch and we’ll stop somewhere to have lunch, taking photos along the way. I’ll include more details on that later. Then a week after that, we are off to the Portland, Maine area for Kent’s birthday.

On Saturday, after the morning rain showers had cleared off, we went out to Mashapaug Pond to just take a leisurely walk through the wood. Below is the interactive map with the photos that we took. We had a great time.

Then yesterday, we went to Newport, Rhode Island for the 10-mile Scenic Tour. We wanted to do it a few weeks ago but decided to wait for a nice sunny day. Well, that day was yesterday. It was gorgeous out and prime weather for beautiful seascapes. I’m working on the photos and will publish them most likely sometime this week.

Other than that, things are going well. I’m already looking forward to next weekend when we do that final lawn mowing and tidying up around the house to get ready for winter.

NOTE ABOUT THE INTERACTIVE PHOTO MAPPING BELOW:

1) to use this functionality, your browser must support Inline Frames and be configured to display them.

2) If you are a subscriber of email alerts from this website, the interactive map will not work in your email client. You need to click on the TITLE of the email entry to take you to the original entry on the website.

3) The more you zoom in, it will start to separate photos into their true position. If you are zoomed out a bit, it may say that there are 5 photos in one location. If you zoom in on that same location a bit more, you will see that there are actually 3 photos taken in one location, and a few feet away, the other two.

4) The map looks really cool in “Hybrid”.

We have arrived!!!!

ok... where to start....

I’ve already told you that we bought a GPS unit to hook to my Nikon D200 (to do this, you need a camera that is GPS aware). I hooked the GPS up to the camera, so as I take photos, the location of the photo is recorded in the EXIF data.

We took our first live trip yesterday to Penwood State Park, a place we haven’t gone to in ten years. Once we parked the car, we hooked the GPS to the camera, and turned on tracking; a way the GPS unit keeps track of your entire hike.

After the trip, I downloaded the photos, as I always do, and prepared them for upload to Flickr. I created a Penwood State Park album, etc. I also uploaded to my website the tracking map file from the GPS unit. With that tracking map file, along with the Flickr photo set ID, I was able to link the two into the map you see below.

The really exciting part of all of this (for me), is that, unlike in the past where I would post a few photos of a trip, along with a link the full album, here...

all the photos of the trip are accessible from this one map
you can click on any hot spot area (the pink numbers), and that will walk you through the photos
if you click on any photo in the “walk through”, it will display a larger image of that photo (click again to go back to the map)
if you click on a photo to enlarge it, at the bottom is a link to the full Flickr album.

And of course, since this is a Google map application, you have the full Google mapping controls built in, such as zoom, hybrid, satellite, move the map around, etc. Here’s the elevation guide (again from the tracking file), followed by the interactive photo map.

NOTE ABOUT THE INTERACTIVE PHOTO MAPPING BELOW:

1) to use this functionality, your browser must support Inline Frames and be configured to display them.

2) If you are a subscriber of email alerts from this website, the interactive map will not work in your email client. You need to click on the TITLE of the email entry to take you to the original entry on the website.

3) The more you zoom in, it will start to separate photos into their true position. If you are zoomed out a bit, it may say that there are 5 photos in one location. If you zoom in on that same location a bit more, you will see that there are actually 3 photos taken in one location, and a few feet away, the other two.

4) The map looks really cool in "Hybrid".

Well, we finally did it. We took a hike today at Valley Falls Park here in Connecticut. We took our new GPS unit with us, hooked it up to the camera, and off we went on our hike. I just took photos along the way as usual. But now, as I take the photo, the camera gets the photo location from the GPS unit itself. I then uploaded them to Flickr and viewed the map. This was the result.

The next thing I want to accomplish is to turn on the tracking feature of the GPS unit. With that, I can upload it and actually have it draw on the map exactly where we hiked. Pretty cool, huh?

Here's a few photos from our day...

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View entire album