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(except I’ve updated here so irregularly lately that you probably didn’t even know I was away…)
Anyway, I spent last week down in Central Otago at a conference (which was really interesting – lots of heated debates going on in the tea breaks, which is always a sign of a successful conference), with the bonus that I was able to stay with Mum instead of the conference hotel, so I got to see lots of my family in between racing up and down to Cromwell. And I got to introduce the kids to Minecraft, which was lots of fun (and when I mentioned we’ve got it set up for multiplayer over our network, the boys invited themselves up to visit us in the holidays ;-))
Another highlight of the trip was a guided tour of Bendigo (note for Australians, yes, we have one too, but ours is a bit more ghost-towny than yours). Dad came along for the walk, so I got to spend some time with him as well.
So generally a very nice way to spend a week when I was technically working!
Pretty pictures from Bendigo:
What is IN that cave in the last picture? spooky. And what is a Bendigo???
The cave is actually a mine – it’s a trench cut into the rock, probably following a vein of gold/quartz.
And Bendigo is the name of a town in Australia, and of a one-time town in NZ. Both were the sites of gold rushes (which is where the NZ one got its name – it was named after the Australian one, because a lot of the miners had come from there), but Australian Bendigo went on to be a largish town, while the NZ one was abandoned after the gold ran out.
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