Resting up Monday after Coming Home from New Zealand

New Zealand Travelog #44
Back home - Mon, 22Apr 2024, 7pm

Today has a day of rest after returning from two weeks in New Zealand and before returning to work on Tuesday. ...Well, it's most of a day of rest. Our flight landed in San Francisco this morning around 6:45am, and we were home— as in walking through our front door— at 7:45am. The balance of the day has been for resting up & getting back into ordinary daily life.

Technically I could have made today a workday instead of taking it as another day of vacation. But, oh, there are so many reasons to have taken it off:

1. There was no guarantee that my flight would have landed on time for me to be home & ready to work by 8am.


2. As it was, I got no sleep on the flight. I knew that was a possibility when I planned. Rolling into a workday on literally zero sleep is not a plan for success.


3. My company offers an "unlimited" vacation policy, so why not take an extra day?


4. Compared even to coming home late one evening and working the next morning, having a day— or most of a day— to readjust after an overseas trip is awesome.

To my last point above, I've said to myself several times today, "Having this rest day is so awesome." What have I done today? A partial list:

• By 10am I realized I was going to need a nap to get through the day. I laid down for an hour. After an hour I realized an hour was not enough, so I added another 45 minutes.


• After my nap I went out for lunch to a favorite local taqueria. After two weeks of mostly disappointing food in New Zealand it was splendid comfort food.


• The weather was amazing Monday afternoon. It was like, "Summer is here!" Especially after 2 weeks of cool weather, overcast skies, and rain most days in New Zealand, it felt like I pulled a Rip Van Winkle and skipped a whole season.


• Driving on the left side of the road again was no challenge. Like I wrote about driving on the right, the change is more hand-eye coordination than muscle memory. Though today I signalled most of my lane changes by turning on my windshield wipers. 🤣


• I spent the afternoon catching up on financial stuff, paying bills, etc. This may sound like displeasurable activity but it was satisfy to get things squared away.


• I made dinner at home. Afterwards we went out for a long soak in the hot tub.


• We watched a bit of TV together


• I did no work. NONE.


• I went to bed at 10pm feeling like I'd had a satisfying, relaxing day— and rejuvenated to get back to work on Tuesday.

Update: the beautiful, near-summer weather at home on Monday (the almanac says it reached 81°!) disappeared almost immediately. By Tuesday temps didn't rise above mid-60s.

I Accidentally My Camera. Ten Days Later....

I accidentally my camera. Fortunately not the WHOLE camera, just one of the lenses. 😰 On our trek to the foot of a glacier on New Zealand's Mt. Cook eleven days ago I was swapping lenses on my camera at a vista point. I put the lens on, and my camera came up "LENS CONTROL ERROR" and wouldn't record. I tried numerous in-the-field fixes but nothing worked. Dejected, I did without the lens for the rest of the hike and indeed for the rest of the vacation in New Zealand.

On the one hand, this was just one lens. I was carrying two others in my kit, and I have another two on the shelf at home.
On the other hand, it's my most-used lens, my spendy ultra-wide angle lens I use for 80%+ of my landscape photography.

Yes, this is the lens I accidentally a few years ago. I was able to send it in for repairs then. Though that time I actually dropped it while climbing a rock, so I felt like I deserved the problem. Repairs cost "only" $323— a relative bargain compared to the $1,000 cost of replacing the lens. On a trip to Comet Falls on the flank of Mt. Rainier two years ago I had a similar "lens control error" message. Then, like now, I tried several field fixes before giving up. Except then, I tried one more time two minutes later, and it worked. It worked until now. And this time I tried multiple times over the course of multiple days. No luck.

I was so saddened and frustrated by the loss of this lens near the start of a long trip, a potentially once-in-a-lifetime trip, that I thought several times about tossing it off a cliff. No, maybe you can fix it again for "only" $400 (inflation, natch), I told myself.

Once back at home this week I tried the lens again. The camera came up with the same error message. I tried cleaning the electrical contacts one more time, using the same method I used halfway around the world... and I'll be damned, it worked!

Well, good news/bad news.... Good news: It works now, so I don't have to hope for a $400 repair instead of a $1,000 replacement. Bad news: I still missed using the lens for easily hundreds of pictures I would've made with it in New Zealand.

New Zealand Travelog Complete... Except for the Backlog 😅

My blog from two weeks in New Zealand looks complete, right? I posted a journal entry about relaxing after arriving home yesterday morning. That means I finished blogging less than 36 hours after the trip I was blogging about— a new record for longer trips— right? Alas, no.

As I noted in a few of the forty-some blogs about the trip so far, I skipped posting photos and details of many of my hiking treks and sightseeing visits. I did that in the interest of keeping the overall travelog better aligned to real time. But now it's time to go back and share a lot of those details.

How much is left to do? Ha, funny story. I made three successive estimates:

• First estimate: 10. Seat-of-the-pants estimate. I figured I have about 10 treks to write about.


• Second estimate: 12-15. I upped the estimate of 10 because I expect some of the longer treks will spread to 2 journal entries each.


• Third estimate: 30. 😳 I realized I could count the number of hiking treks and sightseeing visits I captured photos of. I have the images sorted in a file/folder system, so I just counted the folders. There are 25. Knowing there a few I've already shared while there are also a few that will take more than one blog to share, plus there are a few retrospectives to write, my best estimate now is 30 more blogs about New Zealand. 😰

How long will catching up on a backlog of 30 blogs take?

Well, if I maintain a pace of writing & posting 3 journals/day— which is actually fairly aggressive in terms of time commitment— it'll take 10 days. But I'll want to slip in a few non-NZ blogs amid that stream— y'know, everything else in life I might choose to write about— so it'll take at least, say, 12 days.

And how much time do I actually have?

Well, I leave for my next trip— the club trip to Cabo, Mexico— a week from Saturday. So I've got just 9 more days to get these travelogs out before I'll be starting my next travelog. ...And no, I'm not going to use my time on the beach in Mexico to deal with a blog backlog. I'm going to be adventuring— which means accumulating another blog backlog!

Ultimately this validates my approach of keeping my overall NZ travelog close to real time. I can go back and post pics & details of specific places at my leisure. Some will come between now and when I leave on my next trip, some will come after that trip. April and May are both going to be busy months on this blog.