Obviously a keen pilot like Kai can’t let such an opportunity pass by, and so I found myself, our friend Helen and Kai’s aeroclub buddy Rodney gathering at Wellington airport super early last weekend, waiting for official daylight to start, to make our way up to Ohakea.

The flight up was beautiful – once we had left the low clouds of Wellington behind, the weather turned great and traveling up the coast was pretty awesome. Air traffic close to Ohakea was mad and the air traffic controller who guided all the planes in did a fantastic job getting everyone safely to the ground (although we had to hold for about 40 minutes before we could squeeze in to land). The show itself was pretty good too; there were plenty of military planes from different countries on display, we saw a fantastic avionics exhibition and the flight show was incredibly impressive too. My favourite part was when we were allowed to go back to our parked plane and were able to see the last couple of presentations from the other side of the runway.

The flight back was great as well. We did a quick stop to refuel in Paraparaumu and were back in Wellington shortly after that. It’s super cool that we’re able to fly up to such events ourselves.

For more photos from the event, have a look at Rodney’s blog, he has covered all noteworthy planes and show parts in text and photos in a much better way than I could ever do.

• the minimum age of 5 years implies that this offer is aimed at kids
• there is no way I could convince 20 of my friends to spend a night at the zoo with me.

And so the dream of a zoo sleepover could have stayed a dream forever, if someone on twitter hadn’t sent out a message, wondering if it was ok to do this as an adult. And the Wellington Twitter community – awesome as we are – jumped up and down in joy about this idea. It didn’t even take long to find a volunteer (lovely Amie McCarron) to get the sleepover Tweetup at the zoo organised.

Sure I wanted to be part of this! Unfortunately Kai had already planned a trip to Australia for that week, so he couldn’t come with me. But luckily Nick was keen too, and so he joined me for the adventure. Not that I wouldn’t have survived without him – there were some others I know quite well, and Twitter people are usually super friendly and sociable – but it’s always nice to share a special adventure with a close friend.

Last Saturday evening we all gathered at the zoo, unpacked mattresses and pillows and met our guide for the adventure. She gave us some background information and then we were allowed to explore the zoo after hours. When it started to rain we got shelter at the craft centre, where we built fancy monkey ‘enrichments’. Which translated into non-zoo speak means ‘wrapped-up treats for which the monkeys must work hard to get through to the delicious core’. We were also shown the kitchen (including frozen mice in the walk-in freezer), and some people did a little contest to see who could eat giraffe food fastest.

Back to our over night accommodation (which was overseeing the monkey island from an angle I hadn’t seen before) we split into smaller groups and played Werewolf for a while, as well as an American game called Dirty (I think that was the name). You split into groups and read out very dirty sounding clues to each other, which lead you to guess a completely harmless word. It was heaps of fun.

What followed was a pretty much sleepless night – I guess I’m simply getting too old to spend the night in a room with more than 20 people who snore, receive text messages, snore, get up to go to the bathroom, snore and snore. And receive text messages. All this while outside the window some cranky ducks have family fights and the monkeys of Monkey Island scream and scream. Funny enough all this didn’t really matter. Although I hardly got any sleep all night, it was a little magic to lie there in the dark, listen to the sounds of people breathing and turning around in their sleeping bags. I really enjoyed the night too.

Next morning I managed to get up early enough to get a shower. The Archibald centre at the zoo is not really luxury accommodation, and there was only one shower in the disabled toilets, but after a sleepless night a shower works wonders and I felt quite refreshed when I joined the others again. We had coffee and were tweeted about before we went on an early morning tour through the zoo. It’s pretty awesome to see the animals waking up, having breakfast and being curious about visitors, before they are getting bored from being stared at during the day when hundreds of people storm the zoo. We also got the chance to feed the monkeys with the enrichments we had built the night before. Sad that the time flew by sooooo quickly!

We could have stayed at the zoo for as long as we wanted after it had opened its doors for regular visitors, but Nick and I chose to have food instead. So we met Bex, Leo and Kim at a cafe on Oriental Parade, where we told them all the stories of the fantastic night at the zoo…

There are a couple of take aways for me from this project:

• My life is far from being boring. On the contrary – on some days I did more than one great thing and took a couple of great photos, so that the decision which one to upload at the end of the day wasn’t always easy. Looking back at all 29 posts I can pretty confidently say that my life is awesome.
• It was great to do a joint blog project with Nick, and to watch April and Jennifer doing the same project in the US and Australia. I also appreciate very much that Kai gave it a try, although his busy schedule often didn’t leave him much time to think about taking a photo during the day and uploading at night. But at least he tried.
• I’m again a little puzzled how little people comment on my posts. When I look at the blog stats I can see that quite a few people read them, and I know how many people even get an automated summary sent via email. And still sometimes I feel like I only write them for myself. Which is fair enough, I’m not complaining, but it’s still a bit weird.
• I want to do it again! I probably need a little break right now, but there is a clear benefit in blogging with a project goal in mind. I already noticed this during the 30 Days of Me, and Foto Feb has confirmed it once again: if you have some guidelines and a set schedule, it’s so much easier to sit down and do it.
• I need to put some effort into my blog’s visual appearance, I think at least some redesign work is more than necessary.
• I should carry my camera with me all the time. There are so many great photo opportunities and it’s so much fun going back and looking at all the adventures again.

Feeling better today, but still not super healthy. So I decided to skip gym tonight and walk half of the way home. The walk takes me along the Memorial Trail at Bolton Street Memorial Park and the lower parts of the Botanic Gardens. In the cemetery I came across a tree which has these funny looking cones on its branches. I think they totally look like fluffy little birds with massive fringes, so you can’t see their eyes. I absolutely love them.

And because it’s almost the last day of Foto Feb, here’s a bonus pic:

This is the burial vault towards the end of the Memorial Trail, if you follow the recommended path through the park. The rectangle you can see on the lawn is where 3,700 early settlers were reinterred in a vault after they had been exhumed from their original graves. This happened in the 1960s, when Wellington’s motorway was built and the old cemetery was kind of in the way. Nowadays the cemetery is split in two parts, which are linked by a footbridge.

I was home sick today and when I thought about my foto of the day at some stage, I got worried that I would have to post a picture of me in bed. But luckily our crazy neighbour came to the rescue. He recently got a couple of geese (in addition to the sheep, chickens, ducks and kunekunes), and today they spent the afternoon in the paddock behind our house. Great opportunity for a photo.

Spent most of my day writing an article for a German IT magazine. Interrupted only by the usual things you do during the day: breakfast, gym, nap, dinner.

Teresa and I went opshopping this morning and had to stop the car at some stage to let a pukeko mum and her chick cross.

Lunch time walk. The weather has been a bit shitty lately (see also Nick’s photo from yesterday), but still, there’s “No Place I’d Rather Be”.

We went to La Bella Italia in Petone tonight, to celebrate Kai’s successfully taken Air Law exam as well as our eighth wedding anniversary. Afterwards we went for a little walk along the beach and onto the ferry terminal bridge. It was super windy today, we were almost blown into the sea.

Bob Barker, a Sea Shepherd ship, in Wellington. Spotted at lunch time.