This challenge was selected for both similarities and contrasts. I’m walking a virtual path through England while walking a real life path through New Zealand. We covered thousands of kilometres across the North and South Islands, with the kind of pastoral scenery I’d like to believe I’d have enjoyed if I’d been walking the famous English national trail, Cotswold Way, which is 156 kilometres (97 miles) from Chipping Campden to Bath, traveling through iconic limestone villages, rolling green fields and historic battlefields.
While in New Zealand, we moved by bus (4,308 kilometres) and by various boats (one ferry, one river cruise, one fijord cruise), and still found time to get in enough walking to complete most of this challenge. Not bad! Also, it gave me 22 days straight without staring at a laptop screen or a television, which can only be a good thing for me. We walked in some of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing: mountains, rivers, waterfalls, lakes, oceans, forests, and plains.
Don’t ask me where the photos are. After almost two weeks home I have managed to download the photos from my iPhone to my laptop, but not the ones from my Canon T3i. I have selected the first pass of my “best” list, which needs to be re-done after I fold the Canon ones in, then take the list and drop it to about half whatever my first pass selected, all before I move into Lightroom for a week of photo editing. That was code for: “Y’all would be really lucky if I get them all online before the end of March. I got some stuff going on, y’know? Plus, I’m told patience is a virtue.”
