Coming Home

I love being on holiday. I will post over the week over some of the things I enjoyed on holiday - sights seen, and other delights like not having to turn the heater on all week while my home town enjoyed (if that is the right word) snowfalls.

However coming home has its own delights. Here are some of them:
1) Sharp knives and vegetable peelers. The time share where we stayed has a very well-equipped kitchen, but the blunt knives and vegetable peelers annoyed me all week. We did buy a good cheese slicer, but I tolerated the rest.
2) Housework. It seems strange, but usually when I get back from holiday, I actually enjoy housework for a few days. I get a fresh look at my home and I can see clearly what needs to be done most urgently, so for a couple of days I run around doing it and get a great sense of accomplishment.
3) Finding that trees are bursting into pink blossom all over town while I have been gone.
4) Seeing my daughter again (the one who didn't come with us).
5) Getting shaken out of old routines. Coming back is a chance to do things differently, having adopted different habits in a different environment - drinking less coffee, walking more, getting to bed at a more reasonable hour.
6) Getting to catch up with all my favourite blogs, and play the comment games at Michele's. (We had internet access, but only if we paid fifteen cents a minute, on top of our usual monthly fee to our ISP. It was reserved for urgent things like student offspring who had to e-mail assignments).

Here are two photos of Mt Ruapehu in the central North Island, first as we passed it on the way north and secondly as we passed it on the way south a week later. Snow fell in between the two, while we enjoyed the mild climate further north. Fortunately the road we travelled, which had been closed by snow, was clear by the time we returned.