Home again, home again, jiggety jig

Neither Customs nor Immigration blinked (or even, apparently, checked anything), so here I am in Perth. I’ll post the promised Taieri Gorge pictures after getting urgent local stuff out of the way.

My bike, however, is back in Dunedin. I missed the rendezvous in Dunedin, so put the bike on the bus for use in Christchurch. The coach going the other way broke down, and InterCity needed to swap ours for it because they didn’t have a replacement with enough seats. The replacement (from Ritchies’) didn’t have any cargo area large nough to take a pushbike, either, so happy Dunedin resident Robin is now the proud owner of the much-travelled $10 bike.

The slower, nboisier, much less comfortable replacement coach also needed its headlight wiring fixed before we could set sail (a real confidence builder, that one), so my laptop became a temporary cinema for the dozen or so people within earshot, who followed the antics of Alex, Marty, Gloria, and Melman as they coped with a zoo transfer gone seriously haywire (with the aid of some remarkable penguins — “just smile and wave, boys, smile and wave” and the irrepressible King Julian).

I got to share a ’plane with lesser FOSS royalty GNOME (and now LaunchPad) hacker James Henstridge, and for the second leg actually got a window seat (pictures from that later too).