New Zealand Odyssey: Week 4, The Rain in my Brain

The family on the Harbor Cone, with the Pacific behind.

As I write this entry, we've been here three weeks. The newness of Dunedin has begun to wear off, and the feeling of ordinary life is returning. But now-and-then, when the sun is shining, I get a view of the ocean or of this beautiful city from on-high and it all comes back that we're here, a dream come true.


The rainy winter weather and early darkness begin to "crack the shell". When we arrived, it seemed that summer wasn't so far away, that we could keep riding our bikes on the trails right into the season we'd just left in Montana. But we hadn't seen the socked-in days of rain and winter. We're in that now. We were warned about the rain in Dunedin. Summer isn't as near as I'd hoped.

As great as an adventure like this is, there are times when it's not easy, when the doubts and fears make racket, when gloomy weather seeps into your brain, when you miss home and wonder why you put yourself and your family through such change, when the whole thing is still out in front of you waiting to be experienced.

Whew! That's some gloomy stuff. Luckily, the clouds break now and again, like last Friday evening, when we made it out to the Peninsula again and hiked the Harbor Cone. Damn this place is beautiful!

Ever-present sheep and Otago Harbor in the background.