Go visit the South Island and virtually every local has stories about the filming of LotR. A huge number of them were hired by the production in one way or another, from being extras to providing horses to helping dress all those extras & horses to catering all those people etc.
It was definitely a bucket list sort of thing for me. The trip from the northeast US absolutely sucks (20+ hours in the air) but for 3 weeks there it was worth it.
I literally got to be a part of a group that got to chat with astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson on the ISS yesterday afternoon. It was a really cool, candid, behind the scenes experience as she did a little mini-tour through the space station.
The craziest part for me was when she took her phone to the observatory and we watched the sun vanish behind the horizon of the earth. It happened so quickly and so brilliantly that it took my breath away and nearly brought me to tears. It was spectacular.
It was almost two hours with lengthy breaks as we lost contact a few times. But what an amazing experience.
It’s very much a factor of right place and right time.
For their mental health, the astronauts are required to have calls with people down here. Tracy is an acquaintance of someone my wife knows, so when the call was set up, we made the invite list.
We have no personal connection, we just managed to sit in the room while others talked. Tracy did put out an offer to come visit her at Johnson when she’s back, so you better believe we’ll follow up on that.
One of the best drives I've done is from Queenstown (on the lightning bolt lake) up the west coast to Greymouth (on the north west coast where the snowcaps stop, the plain there).
Beautiful scenery - you'd be driving (no speed limit, so you can concentrate on the bends) through rainforest one minute and then emerge onto a vast river delta with a giant wooden bridge, then back into forest, then out onto a plain with towering snowcapped mountains above you, then back into forest, then pop out at a beautiful beach.
Never experienced anything like it, it's one of my favourite memories of my trip to NZ.
Sorry should clarify - the rainforest road was marked with this sign from the article.
So yes a maximum of 100, but due to the nature of the road there's no way you could do over that without killing yourself. Most of the time, you'd only have time to get up to 60 (if that) before another blind bend.
It just felt nice not to have to worry about speed and focus on the road, because here in Australia they'd have a posted speed limit way too slow and a speed trap around each bend.
That’s one thing I noticed about NZ, during my first trip: the speed limits are generally sane. If anything, the rural speed limits have a genuine sense of reality to them.
In stark contrast, driving in Canada (Toronto area) and the US (Texas) most times I felt I could safely go faster, were it not for the constant threat of speed traps or random / stealth cruisers.
In NZ if you’re doing a long drive and you don’t heed the slower speed limits as you enter a bend in the road, you may have just fucked yourself. Especially if the roads have a layer of moisture, which is likely.
And the more built up areas have a decent amount of traffic calming, which is nice.
Toronto and really all of the GTA need a severe dose of NotJustBikes to get sorted.
