Tuba Christmas Concert - Portland Dec 12, 2009

Welcome to our pictures from the 2009 Tuba Christmas Concert in Portland. When we lived here before, we loved going to this concert each year, even in the rain. You wouldn't think that 300 tubas would sound so good on Christmas carols, but it is really beautiful. We would love to put in a video clip, but there's a 100 MB size limit and the videos that we shot were all over that limit. We need to get some video editing software so that we can edit down the size of the files. We video'd "Silent Night", "Go Tell It On the Mountain", and "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear", so if we get some editing software, we will post our videos of those songs.

It was a full crowd, even in the rain. The concert doesn't start until 1:30 pm, but you should get there by 12:45 pm to get a good seat.

I think that tubas play faster if you put racing flames on them. You can finish the song way ahead of everyone else.

Even better if your tuba has Godzilla-like spines down its back. This will make those wimpy euphonium players think twice about messing with you!

There were some great hats that all of the tuba players wore. We didn't know you could buy these until later. Next year, we may get us some Tuba Christmas scarves.

Of course, some people bring their own hats. We're not sure if this is a "sea urchin" hat, or if he's picking up satellite radio with this thing.

Good hats can also be improvised, assuming there's a clown around with balloons. Just keepin' Portand weird, dude!

Great concert, as always. Followed by a smooth ride home on Max, Portland's light rail.

We hope you enjoyed the photos.

Happy Holidays!

John & Annie

New Zealand 12 - Birds of New Zealand

One of our favorite things to do is to bird-watch. John's Dad spent a lot of time teaching him how to identify various birds. So everywhere we go, we are always on the lookout for native birds. So we will start with our favorite bird in New Zealand - the Tui. The Tui has two vocal boxes, and makes a call that sounds like a beautiful bird call combined with a rusty gate hinge. They were everywhere we went in New Zealand and we loved them. If you would like to hear Tuis and other New Zealand bird sounds, you can go here. Tuis are similar to Myna birds and can be taught to speak. Here is a website where you can hear a Tui sing, whistle, and speak.


Below is a picture of a non-tropical parrot, the Kea. It is a very large bird, and can be very destructive. They are really curious and loved to get onto cars and chew off the wiper blades and the rubber moldings around windshields and windows.

Below is the Bellbird, which is another honeyeater, like the Tui.

On the hike to Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel Peninsula, we saw this barn swallow building a new nest.

The Australian Magpie.

We also saw California quails around out bach on the Coromandel Peninsula. Not sure how they got from California to New Zealand!

The Chaffinch is a beautiful little bird that we saw in all of the thermal spring areas. Sometimes, they were standing in steaming water, oblivious to the heat and steam vapors.

New Zealand's version of the Goldfinch is beautiful, with the red on their heads.

The Little Shag looks like a small cormorant, and we saw them in all of the lakes and on the coast on the Abel Tasman Track.

The Pied Stilt, also seen mostly in the thermal vent areas.

The female Paradise Shelduck.

The male Paradise Shelduck.

Another view of the male Paradise Shelduck at Mirror Lakes.

We hope you have enjoyed our pictures from New Zealand. It was a great trip and it's been fun re-living it when we were putting these blog posts together.

New Zealand 11 - the Vans of New Zealand

One of the ways of visiting New Zealand is to rent a camper van. With the number of national parks and other camping venues, this is a great thing to do. We decided not to do this because it was late winter and we were worried about the cold (WIMPS!) and we didn't know how well we would do driving a big van around on the left side of the road.

But lots of people did rent vans. The great thing about a lot of the vans are their paint jobs. We especially noticed two camping van rental companies - Escape and Wicked. Enjoy the pictures below of the vans we ran across.

All of the Wicked camper vans had this sticker on the side of them.

The next two photos are the different sides of the same van.

New Zealand 10 - Queenstown

We left Te Anau for the half-day drive to Queenstown. Of course, as slow as we drive (compared to the Kiwis) it was a little longer with all the stops for picture taking. Speaking of which, how would you like to live in this house below with this view?

We got into Queenstown and just walked around seeing the sights. The Queenstown Gardens has these wonderful lawn bowling greens. It's a little like bocci ball, except you are truly bowling. The Gardens were beautiful, with trees in bloom all over. As you can see in the picture below, the tulips were also in bloom.

Queenstown is located in this wonderful setting, surrounded by towering mountains. Every view is framed with these snow-capped mountains.

On the walk from our hotel to downtown, we walked by a rugby club, where there always seemed to be people playing. Hands down, rugby is the toughest sport we've seen. No pads, no helmets, no huddles to take breaks, no time-outs. Just two 40 minute halves of hard running and smashing into each other.

Queenstown in located on Lake Wakatipu, a huge lake. Go to Google Maps and search on "Queenstown, New Zealand" to see how big this lake is. There was a beautiful old boat (the S. S. Earnslaw) that took people on trips around the lake

And of course, it wouldn't be a New Zealand lake without an America's cup boat moored on it somewhere. This is an older boat that I never caught the name of.

Queenstown is pretty much heaven for extreme sports enthusiasts. If there's a new way to risk limb and life, it was probably discovered here. People here play hard, then they party hard afterwards. So if jet boating, bungy-jumping, extreme skiing, parachuting, hang gliding, etc. is not your thing, there's not a lot to do around this area. We were a lot more comfortable in the more wild areas of New Zealand.

But that's why they make chocolate and vanilla ice cream.

New Zealand 9 - Milford Sound

We couldn't decide between seeing Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound. We debated it for a long time, and read many opinions on the choice. In the end, we decided to do both. Unfortunately, Annie wasn't feeling great that day, so she couldn't make it. I was marginal myself, but went ahead with the trip.

We took a large bus from Te Anau to Milford Sound and on the way, we stopped at the Mirror Lakes:
We also stopped at the Eglinton Valley viewpoint (below). We saw a kea parrot here. I'll put some pictures in another post on the birds we saw in New Zealand later.

The tide was out for my first view of Milford Sound, but as you can tell, it is impressive. The snow-capped mountain rise straight up from the water and tower over your head.

Here is the ship we took to cruise the sound in. It was older than the Doubtful Sound ship, but since it was such a beautiful day, I wasn't inside very much.

As I said, the mountains just rise straight up out of the water. When I saw the kayakers in the sound (see below picture), it reminded me of the scene from the first Lord of the Rings movie (The Fellowship of the Ring) at the end of the movie when they were taking some boats through a gorge. We did drive by that gorge later (it's near Queenstown), but this view really gave me that same feeling.

Just like the Doubtful Sound cruise, the heavy rains had really made the waterfalls flow.

There were beautiful waterfalls, that dropped hundreds of feet off the side of the mountains. Usually the captain of the ship pulled right up into the waterfalls.

It's hard to overstate the impact that the "wildness" of New Zealand has on you. It's just a magical place, like living in a National Park in the US. You have to remember that New Zealand is the size of California, but only has about 4 million people in it.

We saw the second-rarest bird in the world on the cruise - the Fiordland Crested Penguin.

We also saw some fur seals sunning themselves on the rocks.

Here's one last picture of the feeling you get within the sound. It is breath-taking.

So, which is better - Doubtful Sound or Milford Sound? I still can't say. Milford was beautiful, but we had a very sunny, gorgeous day there. Milford is a little more touristy, and Doubtful Sound is more wild. I loved both of them, and recommend seeing both.

Thanks for checking out the blog!

New Zealand 8 - Doubtful Sound

When you are on a trip, you are pretty much at the mercy of the weather. You only have a defined amount of time to see things, regardless of whether the weather cooperates or not. On the day we went to Doubtful Sound, this is how the day started:



Not very promising! But you can't let the weather keep you from doing things. So to get to Doubtful Sound, you take a boat across Lake Manapouri (from the dock in the picture above). We did get a few photos with both of us in them and below is a photo of us crossing Lake Manapouri.

Once we got across the lake, a bus picked us up and drove us up and over a mountain through rain and fog. We came back down on the western side of the mountain and took a much larger boat to cruise Doubtful Sound. Doubtful Sound is about ten times the side of Milford Sound, which is much more popular. It's hard to choose between them, as both are beautiful. You just cruise along on what seems to be a placid lake, watching the mountains rise up out of the lake and disappear into the fog and clouds overhead.

Since it was very rainy before our cruise, there were thousands of waterfalls cascading off the mountains into the Sound. When I say rainy, I mean RAINY! They do not measure their rainfall in "inches", they measure it in "meters". The Doubtful Sound area gets about 80 meters (250 feet!) of rain a year! Which results in waterfalls everywhere!

At one point the ship's captain pulled the boat into a secluded cove and turned off the motors. We just sat there, listening to the waterfalls. Everyone on the boat was absolutely silent, just enjoying the feeling of experiencing how this area must be when there's no one there.

More waterfalls.

To get a sense of scale of the mountains and the sound, in the picture below, that is not a small boat coming toward us. It's about a 35-foot cruiser.

We'll leave you with one last panorama shot of Doubtful Sound. It didn't quite match well at the water line in the middle of the picture, but it gives you an idea of what the sound looks like.

Thanks for checking in. For the next posting, we will go to Milford Sound, which is north of Doubtful Sound. It's the more popular destination for those who visit the area.