Mae Travels

Here are my favorite posts that I wrote in 2007 about my Shakespeare reading project: Claudius the Evil King Reading "The Merchant of V...

Last year my resolution was to review my very obsolete knowledge of Shakespeare. Through the year, I read several plays, watched recordings,...

The gull colony we saw on Kapiti Island (near Wellington, New Zealand) was incredibly noisy as the gulls really wanted us to go away!

Katherine Mansfield was born in this house on October 14, 1888. Location: 25 Tinakori Road, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand. Two or three ...

I've mentioned that the Maori found the spiral form of the opening fern -- called the koru -- to be a powerful image, which they used in...

Today is December 18 in New Zealand -- it's still yesterday in Michigan. It's our last day here, and we spent several hours in Te Pa...

The weka doesn't know that it is an extremely unusual bird, so it walks around on the ground right in front of the tourists. One weka ha...

We saw a number of native birds besides these gulls, including the large, flightless (and rather clueless) weka, the bellbird, the NZ robin,...

First, here is our guide Todd Rippon , of our tour company: Flat Earth New Zealand Experiences . Todd said we could use this image from his...

The pukeko is a rail-like New Zealand bird, which we saw on our tour of the Martinborough area last Wednesday. Despite all the imported pred...

This afternoon at the wildlife sanctuary we were pleased to see the Kaka -- New Zealand parrot. We actually saw several of them quite close ...

We saw this albatross from the dolphin watching boat. We saw huge numbers of dolphins all around the boat, and loved watching them jump and ...

Thursday and Friday we took small planes, a scenic train, a boat, and many car transfers on a trip from Wellington (last photo) to Kaikoura ...

Sunday night we heard the call of the Little-spotted Kiwi -- very exotic. We heard the tui bird -- a mimic with many cries As darkness fell...

The architecture of the parliament building in Wellington presents some serious contrasts. The earliest parliament building is now the law s...

The spiral of an opening fern was one of the Maori people's favorite visual images, and it occurs throughout their art, I learned. Moder...

Wellington is a very up-and-down city, so of course it has a cable car. On Sunday, I took the cable car with three wives from the conference...

Tomorrow morning we leave for a trip to New Zealand. It will be a very long trip: Detroit-LA-Aukland-Wellington. At this point, our reservat...