I’ve been AWOL from the blog for a couple of days. I have a good excuse, though. Friday I raced from 5.30 am to 7 pm to do two days worth of work in one day. I managed to plant out all the peas, lettuce, and spinach, cleaned the house, baked cookies, did a bunch of writing and editing…

It was all in preparation for taking the entire day off yesterday to go for a hike.

We had a lovely day hiking to the top of Mt. Oxford. It was a long day, too, by any measure—7 1/2 hours of hiking, 31,700 steps (according to the phone’s health app), 20 km, and over 1 km elevation from carpark to peak.

Starting from a honey bee farm, the track climbs through beech forest and into subalpine tussock. Yesterday the hike had everything—snow, mud, sun and rain, wind. The lichens were especially exuberant, as was one particular rifleman (a tiny bird, for those of you unfamiliar with NZ fauna) who shot through the trees with such abandon, it smacked me in the face. It was the perfect springtime adventure.