Gretchen Markle

Travel Blog

(posted on 29 Aug 2016)

We seem to be getting one bad day and then one good day. Today, we got everything all in the same 24 hours - several times over. Relatively clear when we went to bed last night, pouring rain and windy when we awoke, sunny intervals this afternoon, then grey again.

After seeing some lovely field sketches by Alison Watt (boy, can she draw!), I decided to attack my own sketches a bit more quickly - and, hopefully, more loosely. Lightly go we...

Olive Grove

I maybe should have put a bit more thought and planning into the composition and the distribution of lights/whites. The clouds don't have to be exactly where I saw them when I began. After all, by the time I've finished, they've disappeared and most likely the sky has completely changed!

TODAY'S TIDBIT

Unlike BC, where the speed limit on any stretch of road is tailored to the engineering and conditions of that particular bit of pavement, here in NZ there are just two speeds: 100 kph on the highways and 50 kph inside the towns. If you are driving along a road that passess through villages, there will be a speed sign at the beginning of each town - a circle with a 50 inside. However, when you exit the town, all you usually see is a cirle with a slash across it. This means, "Resume speed". Ironically, the symbol looks an awful lot like the symbol that is used for 'Do NOT... whatever" back home.