A Celebration of Fifty Years

My goodness, can you believe we've been married fifty years?  Well...it'll be fifty years in December.  Now it's only October, but we leave today on a celebratory trip, the highlight of which will be twelve days in New Zealand.  There's more, but  let's not give it all away before the fact.  Please join Tom and me and wish us well as we travel around the globe for the third time.  What a beautiful world we live in and how lucky we are...

I used to keep travel LOGS.  I would carry a leather bound journal, compulsively jotting down notes, phrases, pithy quotes from travel mates and sometimes even long descriptions--all in longhand.  Inside the journal I would stuff restaurant receipts, train tickets, theatre stubs and other memory joggers until it burst at the seams. To re-construct the trip at leisure and make a memory book was always the goal, but seldom realized.   All that detritus is still here somewhere, but the chances of my finding it, let alone organizing it, are approximately slim to zero.  

The travel BLOG, however--that wonderful offshoot of our modern technology--is instant organization!  All the pictures, prose and memories are stored in one place, presumably forever, and magically organized for me.  All I have to do is do it.  So, if you are interested in our meanderings, please join us in yet another recorded journal of our travels, this time mostly to places we haven't yet seen.  Today we do the last of the packing, and then wait around until SEVEN PM to leave for the airport.  The Qantas flight leaves at the ungodly hour of ten PM for the first leg of the journey—16 hours to Brisbane, Australia, wait around for three hours for our connecting flight, and then back the opposite way for almost four hours to Auckland, New Zealand.  

By the way in case you're wondering who the kid with the big smile and the hummingbird is...it's grandson Dylan, David and Kelly’s youngest, last summer in Beaver Creek.  After a fair amount of coaxing, he was able to get this little femme fatale to perch on his finger, almost at will.  I love this picture and had to share it with you, and anyway I don't have any trip pictures yet and need to practice posting them.  Thanks for your indulgence!

See you in Auckland...