Thanks! :) Thank god for digital photography, allowing amateurs everywhere to skew the odds in their favour. Sometimes quantity eventually gets you quality. :D

Thanks Obi - full credit goes to the scenery and the camera. I'm not sure it's possible to take a bad picture in New Zealand, for example. :)

Can I tell you, he was a party animal!! That dent in his head was *earned*... I'm not sure the world is ready to hear the full story. ;-)

And I used to be soooo envious of people who lived in the mountains (still am, honestly): all the lovely, ever changing scenery. All that *green* (can you tell the Smokey Mountains were the first I'd ever seen? The Rockies were a surprise, lol.).

And seriously, these represent the power of sheer statistics: there are thousands of photos of my fingers, the floor of the car, or some unidentifiable fuzzy object for every one of these. :)

LOL. That does make me feel better about my own camera prowess.

Truth be told, I miss having the Wasatch Mountains on all sides. Horizons are freaky. ;)

The Rockies are real mountains. Real mountains need tree lines. :p

The Amazon are real mountains too and they don't need no stinkin' tree line. ;-)

I kid - of course there's a tree line, but it much higher up than the Rockies, where the tree line starts... where exactly? All I remember are rocks. :D

I just remember being disappointed with the Appalachians since they just looked like big hills with trees on.

You're right - I thought they were majestic until I saw the Rockies and the Amazon, now... they're just really awesome hills. :)

Thanks PoI - I was so pleased with that sunrise photo. Both for the way it came out AND my being up long enough to take it. :D

Yes! I'm so glad I could brighten someone's day with them. :)

Thank you! :)

Thanks! George and I really bonded that day... I was sad to say goodbye...::sniff:: He never writes...

Great Ocean Road is the only place I've ever seen koalas in the wild; it's an amazing drive any time of year. :)

It totally is. (We visited in April, IIRC.)

Ah, pen friendship ... but it *is* a bit hard to maintain if you haven't got any arms and your computer -- literally -- freezes if you drip all over it, you have to give him that!

Oh, I'm sure that's his excuse, but I'm convinced he met some snow bunny and his heart melted.

And you've melted into your constituent parts...

See? Melting all around, hearts and otherwise!

NOTHING should deter you from New Zealand. The Aussies will likely take my visa away for saying this, but unlike Australia (which is TOTALLY worth seeing btw), there's no downside to New Zealand: it's small, so everything is accessible, they don't have any animals there that live to kill you, and there is no ugly anywhere. Everything there is breath-taking and the food is delicious.

They're also the most gracefully inclusive place I've ever been to; I'm sure they fought hard for it, but their seamless integration between European culture and Maori culture should be the standard for everyone.

Which one? ;-)

If you mean New Zealand, I almost didn't have to, lol. There was a snafu with my Aussie Visa that AU didn't tell me about until *after* I'd left immigration on my way to NZ. "You can't come back here, but have a nice trip!". o_O It took days of digging to finally figure out the issue and discover it could be fixed in a few hours (and several hundred $$ of course), but there was a day there when it looked like I'd be staying in Auckland for a week or two. :P If you have to get stuck in a foreign country, NZ would be at the top of my list, so it was not all tragedy. :)

I do miss Florida though - although with the state of things in the US, I'm not in a hurry to do more than visit home at this point.