I’ve been getting wanderlust again lately. I haven’t been out of Australia in almost a decade, and when you compare that to the first part of my life where my family moved around quite a bit because of my father’s work, it somehow feels less stimulating to keep seeing the same things over and over again. Add to that a real desperate need to get away from my job for even the shortest amount of time, and suddenly I’m winging my way over the Tasman to see Auckland and visit with an old friend from high school. It may not be the most glamourous of holidays, but it’s better than the alternative: sitting at work and bitching about how I don’t want to be there. The following journal entries are only slightly edited, and written on as on the spot as I could get – I didn’t want to have to recall everything weeks later.