Author Archives: ontheroadwithdec

Birds of the Galapagos Islands – Part 1 I will do a few blogs on the birds of the islands. They are certainly the most abundant and most famous of the vertebrate animals on this remote archipelago. In case you favor the huge land tortoises as the most famous of the Galapagos vertebrates I willContinue reading “The Birds of the Galapagos –”

Some of New Zealand’s More Common Birds A rainbow sweeps around our motor vessel in Milford Sound. An ocean trip from here could garner twenty species of pelagic birds – we did see Australasian Gannet (Morus serrator), lots of distant Pintado Petrel (Daption capense or Cape Pigeon) and two Southern Royal Albatrosses (Diomedea epomophora).  There are twoContinue reading “Birds of New Zealand”

New Zealand is a collection of islands – two of them large, one smallish and then there a lot of really small ones. For about 83,000,000 years this land mass drifted alone in the south Pacific, the very south Pacific. The land mass that is now New Zealand is part of a larger mass mostContinue reading “The First People of New Zealand (probably)”

The caves on the North Island are quite famous; great limestone excavations made over time by the one of the most passive and vigorous agents on the planet – water. The caves are in an area of rolling mountains, well eroded from their original height. The limestone is from ages ago when these hillsides wereContinue reading “The Caves at Ruakuri & Geysers of Rotorua”

The following is an unillustrated account of the Computer Saga.  The flight from Auckland to Los Angeles was a bit bumpy and the rear of the plane seemed bumpiest. Though there was ample leg-room and plenty of fresh air on this flight I did not sleep much or very well. I arrived at LAX tiredContinue reading “A TSA interaction on my return trip”

Today was the Milford Sound day – what a day. Glorious weather, a great boat trip, and I got to take the small plane flight that returned some of us over the Southern Alps back to Queenstown. The flight was $375 but we paid $325 as we were the after-four departure (go figure). The weatherContinue reading “Queenstown and Milford Sound”

This is about as far south as people seem to be able to live. It is more than 1000 miles from Australia and quite a bit further south. The flight from Sydney is about 2.5 hours and we arrived in the early afternoon. Jack Clyne met us and we were in the Rydges Hotel byContinue reading “New Zealand is beautiful….but”

Sydney is a nice city, as I have mentioned, and quite expensive. (Actually Australia as a whole is expensive – their dollar and the US dollar are just about equal right now and things cost more here.) I have the occasional Diet Coke and have not yet paid less than $3.20 in any kind ofContinue reading “The Last Day in Sydney”

I am a fan of open spaces and remote vistas. However, I realize that as an animal we humans are very social and city life agrees with something in our nature. That being said, I find few cities to be designed to accommodate the broader array of human associations – cities are designed one pieceContinue reading “Sydney is a (nice) City”