Ballycumber here I come!

Too late to back out now, I’ve booked my flights. Next March I’ll be off to Ireland, for a couple of weeks road-tripping with Lytteltonwitch, followed by the 2012 Bookcrossing Convention in Dublin and a visit to Ballycumber, spiritual home of the bookcrossing mascot.

And hopefully, to catch up with a few Australian friends along the way too. To get the cheapest possible flights I’m having to take a slightly convoluted route via Australia and the UAE, with a longish stopover in Australia – about 6 hours in Sydney on the way over, and about 8 hours in Brisbane on the way back, both of which give me more than enough time to get into the city for a bit.

So if anyone is free for lunch in Sydney on Saturday 24 March, or in Brisbane on Thursday 19 April, write “meetup with FutureCat”* in your diary now 🙂

So now all I have to do is save frantically for the next 6 months so I can actually afford the road trip bit…

*Actually, if you’re in Brisbane, better write “meetup with probably very woozy FutureCat who will have been awake for about 30 hours by that point.”

Had lunch with Alkaline-Kiwi and Erock today. It was great to see them, and catch up on their adventures. AK gave me a copy of a zine she’d written (which features bookcrossing and cats, so it’s got to be good :-)), and I passed on a few books. Pity we didn’t have longer to chat, but I had a meeting to race off to 🙁

And a bit late, because I kept forgetting to upload it, but here’s another photo of the snow last week, taken a few hours after the first picture, when the sun came out for a few minutes and made everything look all pretty and sparkling:

I stuck a ruler into the middle of the lawn not long after I took that photo, and the snow was 13cm (about 5 inches) deep! (ok, so that probably doesn’t sound so impressive to the northern hemisphere types who last winter were measuring their snow in feet, but it’s the most snow I’ve ever seen in NZ)