Weekend Kelburn and Wadestown

Another day, another photo upload and slideshow service. :-/ Photobucket wasn't playing nice with Firefox and Java and Vista... that's a powderkeg of conflicting internet forces right there. So I give you: Picasa.

Here's our album from today's (Saturday's) trip around the Wellington area.

First we went to Kelburn and it started raining on us. Then we went to Wadestown where the wind blew at us. I'm starting to understand the whole Windy-Welly-Winter thing now. We'd been the lucky beneficiaries of some unseasonably sunny and mild ("fine" they call it here) days when we arrived and I feel like the Real Wellington is starting to assert itself now.

We set off on foot, and then got quickly demoralized by the climbing and climbing and climbing that it took to move very little distance on our map. The area between the Wellington CBD (Central Business District) and Kelburn is pretty much vertical... something that you absolutely DON'T get by looking at a map. Or Google Maps. Or Google Earth even.

But today I discovered how to calibrate Google Earth to approximate the sense of actually being there. In Google Earth, go to the Tools menu and select Options. At the Google Earth Options dialog box, 3D View tab, set Terrain Exaggeration to 3. It's as high as it goes.

It works. I flew around and panned around the areas we visited today and that's pretty close to the sense you get when actually climbing the hills. This has proven tremendously helpful when scouting around the Wellington area in Google Earth. It gives you a much better sense of how different neighborhoods are connected and what direction the houses are likely to face.

Oh, and towards the end of todays photos I turned the camera over to Zoe and then to Haley. I'm sure you can tell which ones are theirs.

And for those of you who really WANT to comment on our blog but are annoyed by having to have a blogger/blogspot account to do it, we hear your cries. I turned that off, and even turned off the annoying "CAPTCHA" enter-these-letters-and-numbers-to-prove-you're-not-a-spambot bit too. Hopefully that'll make it easier to comment and we won't get nailed with a bunch of bot traffic promising male enhancement.