A very short note here from cloudy, yet warm, Auckland.
It has been a busy few days: flight to Japan via Heathrow; three days of madly rushing around Tokyo taking in the sights, eating great food and immersing ourselves in Japanese culture; another day of flying to New Zealand via Brisbane, Australia; and then charging around Auckland for most of today. Tomorrow we rent a car and motor southwards. To where, we have no idea, and that's exactly the way it should be.
I'm now in the middle of last, last minute preparations; it's just after 10 PM here, and I'm heading for the airport in, oh, about six hours. All I have left to do is pack. That will involve five minutes of throwing clothes into a backpack, thirty minutes of trying to decide what books to bring along (why is it that every time I go away, what I really want to read is either in hardback or those oversized softbacks which are entirely an inappropriate size for travel?), spend far too much time copying music onto my iPod, and then repacking my bag because I always figure I've forgotten something vital -- underwear, toothbrush, passport ...
Preparations are almost complete for the month-long tour of New Zealand -- with a bit of Toyko thrown in for good measure. Let's see ... the checklist: yen, dollars, passport, tickets (well, one of the three of us going has them), driver's licence, obligatory guidebook(s), insurance, accomodation bookings. Check, check, check and check. And don't forget the camera and small pile of memory sticks! I sense a photographic frenzy looming on this trip ...
The Green Man has been online over a week now, but it'll be while before the next story, The Voyage, is available. When I first thought to create recordings of these tales, I wanted to release one roughly once a month. I figured that a month would give me enough time to write something -- if I had already worked my way through the back catalogue -- and for Regina to record it. Any stories that were long enough to justify splitting into multiple podcasts, then I'd release those parts weekly. But new stories: one a month.
Well, well ... I actually managed to crawl out of bed before 11 AM on this nice, mild Irish Saturday morning. The reason for my incredulity is that I crawled into bed last night around 3:30 AM. My insomnia was in no small way caused by the two large mugs of coffee I downed late that evening; I had just arrived back from Dublin and had trekked to Heuston Station through torrential rain, and was soggy and grumpy. Two and a half hours soaking wet on an overcrowded train usually ends with me throwing caution to the wind when I get home.
