Zen and the Art of Packing

Hello,
My last day of work tomorrow! Last Saturday I had my last gig with The Immigrants which turned out to be a great gig despite my onset of nerves and exhaustion. A few pics are posted below. Plus a minute long video of The Immigrants rocking a Beatle's tune (with a Jon solo).

We don't need no stinking bags (my hero).
Doing travel research on the internet puts you on a never ending journey of useful advice, interesting stories and interesting people. The other day I found the site of this man, Anders Ansar, my hero. He traveled the tropical regions of India with no luggage, backpacks or containment units of any kind. Why did he do it? He wanted to see if he could. I mean seriously, I love this guy. While I'm not about to go to that extreme, he has inspired me take my underwear count down from 8 to 7 pairs. Thank you Anders.

Soon after finding Ander's site, I found the site of this guy who is basically just a nutter who likes sticking a lot of things in his pockets.

Our prepping continues as the countdown is now at 4 days! Car still not sold, visas not sorted, we're actually not even in possession of our passports at the moment. Should be interesting.

Pictures
Here are 4 shots from Saturday...

On Leaving

Hi all,
Gay and I are slowly marking things off our to do list. Strange to think we have about 1 week left and it's just starting to hit me. I haven't been sleeping well and it seems like I'm not going to get everything done in time. But I'm used to it already because this is the exact experience I had when getting ready to come to NZ.

Leaving New Zealand
My last day of work is next Tuesday, May 1st. Last weekend my co-workers threw a big going away bbq for me. It was a lot of fun and since all of my best New Zealand, and more specifically Nelson memories were with people I directly or indirectly work with, seeing everybody in one place made me do a lot of reflection.
Thinking about how I was before leaving San Francisco, I was fully expecting life in New Zealand to be; ok, not great and no where near as good as my SF life. Now, as I'm leaving NZ, it turns out that my experience here was better than I could've ever expected. Admittedly, it wasn't all happy times, but life never is and through it all I've met some great people and had some amazing experiences. All in all, it's going to be hard to leave this place and sometimes I wonder why I want to go back to the US; I mean with people getting shot in schools, Bush ready to take Iran and whatever else is going on with Alec Baldwin.
But the bottom line is I just never felt like New Zealand was my home. No matter how beautiful the landscapes and no matter how welcoming the people are; I could never stop feeling like I was a stranger.

Our Wedding?
Somehow, amidst all the stuff we have to do, Gay is able to think about and plan our wedding. She already has me looking at venues and rings and every time I open firefox i see something like "bergdorf dresses" in the search box. It's astounding really, I'm overwhelmed with tidying everything here and thinking about our trip and she's putting together a picture log of the cakes she wants. Anyway, apparently we're thinking late August '08 would be a good time to have the wedding.

Our Travel Itinerary
In case some of you are wondering or maybe some of you plan to be traveling in Asia during the next 6 months and want to meet up..the following is our itinerary:

• Bali
• Bhutan
• Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Loas, Vietnam)
• Japan
• China
• India
• Back to Thailand
• Back to New Zealand
• Back to USA

So we'll probably do one more post before we shove off. This Saturday is my last gig and should be a good party.

Jon

Pictures of recent events..(50th post!!)

Hello...

Here are some pictures of 2 recent events I spoke about in my last blog entry. My surprise birthday and our easter hiking adventure. Also, this post happens to be our 50th.. woohoo!

Pictures
Birthday party
In my last post I told you went fishing and then swimming had a bbq, then played some music. Hopefully these pictures will show just how much fun we had.

4 days hiking the Pelorous River Bush Track
My mate Thomas (the tall guy with glasses) gave me all the pics he took from the trip and he has better camera skills than me, so if the pics look cooler than usual, you know why. The end has a funny shot of Gay drying her sweaty bra over the camp fire as everyone else at dinner. Yeah it was gross, and from the pic you can tell Thomas was about to lose it.

Tahiti pictures

Hello,

Sorry it took so long, but, there are about 60 pictures from Tahiti below. Enjoy.

My surprise birthday party
Gay planned an awesome day for surprise bday gig. We went out with about 14 of my good friends here and half the day on a beautiful catamaran boat doing some fishing, drinking, eating and just hanging out. Nobody caught any fish so a few of us decided to strip down and jump in the water. After that we went back to our place for a bbq, then we went down to the pub and The Immigrants had a somewhat impromptu gig. We rocked and Gay danced.

Easter Vacation
We had an extra long break for Easter and Gay and I spent 4 days in the bush, tramping the Pelorous River track with 2 other couples. We had a great time doing some tough walking but it was good practice for us getting ready for our trip to have our packs on our backs for most of the day. It was a lesson in the importance of packing lite. I'll have some good pics of the hiking trip in the next post as well.

Pictures
Tahiti pics below....
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