Paris - City of Lights

Walking in Paris on a warm spring night!  It's hard not to just go into "tourist mode" and soak it up.

More winter

"Snow is snowy when it's snowing
I'm sorry it's slushy when it's going."

Ogden Nash

More snow

"Winter should not be considered as only negation and destruction.  It is a secret and inward working of powers, which in spring will burst into visible activity."  Henry James Slack

 

 

Snow

"Silently, like thoughts come and go, the snowflakes fall, each one a gem."  

William Hamilton Gibson

 

Clyde

Clyde, New Zealand, is a place we had driven through before, but now we took a little more time to explore it.  We had lunch in a coffee shop.  The wall of its outdoor terrace was an old church wall.  It felt very peaceful there.

"Photography is an art of observation.  It has little to do with the things you see, and everything to do with the way you see them."
Elliot Erwitt

The beauty inside

Not only are the exteriors of the buildings in Oamaru's Victorian Precinct beautiful, so are the interiors.

"If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it."  Frank Lloyd Wright

Heritage

Old buildings are like a magnet for me.  Oamaru New Zealand was overpowering.  The Victorian Precinct is a section of the city where beautiful old buildings have been preserved.  In what I thought of as the back of the section were the warehouses and utilitarian spaces that I found fascinating.  These are the spaces where workers laboured to build the country.

"Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space."  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

At the seashore

I love my travel companions and they are always very agreeable to my stopping and photographing whatever and whenever I want.  My favourite time however, is the time I spend alone, very early in the morning, and if it's by the sea, that's even better.

"The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever."  Jacques Cousteau

Foxgloves

Foxgloves are tall beautiful flowers.  They are not native to New Zealand but seemed to be everywhere, blooming just for me and my camera.  

"The amen of nature is always a flower."  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

 

Toadstools

I haven't posted for a while.  I've been away making good use of my camera in New Zealand.  One of my favourite things to do is walk.  Walking in New Zealand in December is such fun because the sights and sounds are so different from home and winter.  I spied these little toadstools on the first day we walked and I watched for them every day.  It became rather dry, and they stopped growing as abundantly, but they seemed to have popped up just for me.