I’d swear it was even hotter when the wind was blowing.

I’ve posted a bunch of pictures of our trip to New Zealand but they don’t mean much without some context. Here’s some of the highlights from the first few days.

We left home for the Melbourne Airport on Saturday morning before 6:00am with two suitcases, two car seats, a couple of carry on bags, two bleary-eyed but well mannered children, and two tired parents.

The Emirates Airlines flight from Dubai to Auckland was almost full even before we jumped on during its brief stop in Melbourne. Twyla had a breakfast of boiled eggs and zucchini muffins for us while we waited for the incoming passengers to go through customs and get back on board.

For two parents used to the annoyances and perpetual discomfort of international travel, the three and half hour flight and arrival in Auckland was eerily pleasant. Peter was a excited as always to fly and spent most of the trip reviewing the airline safety card pamphlet. Once on the ground, a call to the van company left us waiting just a few minutes in the cool, clear Summer weather outside. Then we were on our way to the meet our temporary, traveling home.

The camper van was big, had a manual transmission and a dreadfully sparse atlas of the country’s roads. To Peter’s delight, however, it did indeed have “three beds, a little stove, a little oven, a little shower, a potty, and a fridgratorator” just as the brochure had promised him and as he had recited everyday for the past two weeks. We were off, still full of excitement, with precious few hours before sunset. First mission… find food.

We felt our way to Auckland’s Grey Lynn neighborhood where our friend and native Kiwi, Emma, had recommended a local grocery. We found them ten minutes too late… they were already closed for the day.

We needed to eat but the immediate vicinity provided only two conspicuous options: a pub and an Italian restaurant. Parental instincts overpowering our wheat-averse culinary preference, we opted for Italian, stared in disbelief at the pasta-only menu, and promptly headed to the pub, children in tow.

It was now almost dark and, according to our GPS unit, we had a 45 minute drive to our campsite at Piha, a famous surf beach on the west coast. I don’t know if it was the unfamiliar girth of the van or the absolute darkness once we left the city but the road to Piha was the most narrow and windy I have ever traveled. I remember absolute silence the entire way but I’m not sure if it was because I focused so intently on the road or because everyone else was terrified.

We pulled into Piha Motor Camp just after 9:00PM to the sounds of a huge party coming from the direction of the beach. Regardless, we found a quiet corner in a field, and promptly fell asleep, the four of us side-by-side on the large rear bed.

As a father, I would hope my first thought in a time of crisis would be for the safety of my family. When the siren went off at what must have been two or three in the morning, I’m pretty sure my first thought was, “Holy Shit! Does our insurance cover the camper van rolling into the ocean?” It was a silly thought in retrospect since I was also pretty sure the world was coming to an end anyway.

We found out later that morning that the local volunteer fire department relies on a World War II era air-raid siren to call them in for duty. We unfortunately parked not 30 meters from it on a day when they just happen to have an emergency at 3:00am. We eventually got back to sleep despite the ongoing beach party and were greeted the next morning by a beautiful sunny day.

From New Zealand 2008

After breakfast, we walked to the beach that surrounds Lion Rock. The scorching grey sand sparkled in the sunlight and turned to black mud where ever it found wet skin. A shallow fresh-water stream rolls down from the hills and around Lions Rock before merging with the ocean. It became our play spot that afternoon. The ocean waves were better suited to the surfers than the swimmers but we did see a number of both in the cold water.

Back in the van, we washed up, had lunch, and headed out from Piha back to the grocer that we had missed the previous day. Our destination that evening was a quite holiday park in Manukau, a suburb on the south side of Auckland. It was a good spot to regroup before a longer drive to the Coromandel peninsula the next day.

Twyla and I often talk about the livability of Melbourne primarily in the context of our ongoing debate about if, when, and where we will we move next. In the car a few days ago we did some quick calculations about our driving habits compared to what we were used to in Texas. We leased a new car about eleven months ago and it just recently cracked 4,000 kilometers. In Texas we drove an average of 12,000 miles per year in each of our two cars. Collectively that’s almost 40,000 kilometers a year. I think that’s one of the reasons why we like this city so much.

This short review of the impacts of bacteria on the body is absolutely fascinating. It’s also a topic that Twyla is passionate about, having devoured every book, article, and online discussion she can get her hands on.

Introducing and maintaining beneficial bacteria in our kids from, literally, the beginning of their lives will be the single biggest determining factor in their lifelong health. It’s also why we treat antibiotics with extreme caution, using them only as a last resort.

It is becoming increasingly clear that different bacteria provide people with different advantages and disadvantages. All over the world, teams of scientists are looking at how bacteria affect the folks they live in. Certain bacteria have been linked to the incidence of stomach ulcers, but take away those bacteria with antibiotics, and young people get more asthma, hay fever, allergies and eczema.

We try to foster good gut health in ourselves and in our kids primarily through the things that we can directly influence, like diet, as opposed to the things we can’t influence as much, like environment (i.e. hands in mouths, etc).

Granted, all of my understanding of the subject comes second-hand from discussions with Twyla but we already know that diet affects behavior and, with some studies linking diet with autism ^[1], it can’t be too much of a leap to start talking about bacterial health and its affects on child development ^[2] and personality.

Implications of this research go even further when you consider the reference to geographical differences.

…a person who grows up in Argentina and another who grows up in northern Alaska tend to acquire different bacteria … these differences seem to matter…

It reinforces the ‘eat local’ mantra pushed by the slow-food/organic/bio-dynamic communities.

Notes:
[1] I realize the link between diet and autism is controversial as it seems to presume that autism is, then, preventable but, nevertheless, the studies exist and the research seems to be continuing.
[2] While not related to a discussion of bacteria, I thought this article about ADHD’s (non)existence was interesting too especially when you start drawing the links between all of these topics.

At my desk in the office on election day… local time is 12:10PM, 7:10PM in Austin. I’ve can’t get the audio feed from KUT or the video feed from CNN so I’ve got all of the following on my screen right now:

• New York Times Election Results Dashboard
• MSNBC Election Widget
• Daily Kos Electoral Map
• New York Times Presidential Election Map (manual refresh required)
• MSNBC First Read blog page (manual refresh required)
• Daily Kos homepage (manual refresh required)
• and a few other pages that I’m cycling through.

Watching this in on the web is definitely not as exciting as live TV but I’ll take what I can get. Overall though, this is very nerve wracking.

After a hard drive crashed a few months ago, I made the switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu on my work laptop. I’ve used Linux for a long time but hadn’t run it as my primary system for years and especially not at work. It’s really been great and I’ve been able to integrate with our Windows-based office network and apps fairly easily.

I still run XP in a virtual machine but only for Outlook and the odd corporate application that hasn’t made it out of the stone-age and onto the net.

Of the few annoyances I ran into after the switch, slower network performance had me pulling my hair out until I found a fix for a 2.6.x kernel problem.

I sent in our absentee ballots for the ‘08 election yesterday. It was a bit anticlimactic after having followed the race so closely, swept up in the excitement of a potentially historic vote. I missed not going to the community center at the “Y”, signing in and manipulating the big red dial on the electroinc voting machine. Absentee voting was incredibly easy though and FedEx guarantees one day delivery of the ballots for free from here.

Related Australian Fact O’The Day: In Australia, voting is mandatory. As in, there is a federal law here that requires each citizen to vote. That still puzzles me. And my Australian friends think it’s equally bizarre that it’s not mandatory in the US.

A recent visitor to our house in Austin…

Picture courtesy of Lolo.

Update 8-Oct-2008: It’s a harmless orbweaver spider. Scroll down to Orbweavers on this page. Remarkable that the picture is almost identical.

Flights to Auckland? … check

iPod loaded with The Lord of the Rings soundtrack? … check

Campervan booked for an eight day driving tour during which my wife, two small children, and I will camp on the side of the road in a foreign country where sheep out number people 20 to 1? … check