World Tour

During 2001-2002 I made a lap of the planet with my wife, Julie, and my laptop. We lived in five different cities -- Vancouver Canada, Reykjavik Iceland, Zurich Switzerland, Auckland New Zealand, and Kyoto Japan -- for (average) 2.5 months each. During that time I wrote Fluency with Information Technology, but there was still time to travel. We took 6300 digital photos. Here are five representative shots.

We stopped at Nacusp, deep in the forests of British Columbia, to enjoy the hot springs. But before taking the waters, I had to think up some homework exercises!

In Iceland we visited the island of Heimaey. On January 23, 1973 Heimaey split open along a 1.6 Km crack and started spewing lava. The resulting cone, which I'm sitting on, threatened Heimaey's harbor and thus their livelihood from fishing. So, Heimaey’s citizens squirted seawater on the harbor side of the volcano for 6 months, stopping the lava from filling up their harbor. It was a heroic battle and an amazing sight to see!

The fastidious Swiss are very enthusiastic recyclers … perhaps too enthusiastic.

This typical postcard photo shows Cape Reina, the northern-most point in New Zealand. The interesting thing about Cape Reina, in fact, all of New Zealand is that it is way out in the Pacific, two time zones from Australia and huge distances from the islands of Polynesia. It was uninhabited until the Maoris arrived in A.D. 900. How did they find it??? No one sails a hollowed-out log 1000 Km into the Pacific without some expectation of finding land. But how can you know there is land if no one has been there? And back?!

Kyoto was the capital of Japan for more than 1000 years, and is filled with Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Many have beautiful gardens like Manshu-in shown here. The tranquility of the gardens helps one contemplate. And think up homework exercises!