A little bit more of NZ ......

Williamson

Part of the furniture
Our Saturday (30 April) evening arrival got off to a bad start with our Jetstar flight delayed a coupla hours, arrived a midnight. Even the upgrade to Business Class was not much consulation, as on an A320 this means you get in row 1 with a bit more leg room.

Checked into the Novetel over the road from baggage claim at 12:00 midnight, and checked out at midday Sunday - just what I needed, spend my first ever 12 hours on the north island in a fricken hotel room.

Picked rental RAV4, headed for motorway and Pukekohe, lunch, a walk, some sight seeing but no pics.

Overnight at Raglan - what quaint, sweet little spot that is, buzzing and humming with backpackers and holiday makers, plenty of cafes and restaurants open.

Found the Isobar (and a coupla pints of craft beer), and nice seafood restaurant via a seaside walk.

24 hour/2,600km from home, but Helen found her place.

 

Williamson

Part of the furniture
80 years ago you woulda be over the moon with that :killingme
...... I should've pretty pleased in current days.

From Raglan, we headed for Kawhai, on the way there were some spectacular views.

Lookout above Ngarunui Beach:








Te Toto:














The road was interesting, as were the signs:


I wondered what this sign means, after seeing many more in the following days, I'm none wiser. I don't remember them from the South Island in 2014, that's not surprising, I don't remember much from 2014.



So far the local people have been very welcoming, the residents here may also have been welcoming - if they were hungry - we didn't wait to find out.



The road had turned to gravel and although it was quite firm and the RAV handled it well, but the going was slow, very slow, and it was clear that at our rate we were not going to get to New Plymouth at a respectable time that evening, so we turned around headed back to Ragaln for a late bakery lunch.

A beef steak pie and vanilla custard slice went down well. Yummmm ....... I might need to add Raglan to the Best Biken Bakeries thread on ADV

After lunch, we found a Bridal Falls:



Despite the U-turn, we still didn't make it to New Plymouth, but we did get to Taumarunui for the night.
 

nev

Super Térrarist
The road was interesting, as were the signs:


I wondered what this sign means, after seeing many more in the following days, I'm none wiser. I don't remember them from the South Island in 2014, that's not surprising, I don't remember much from 2014.

It's an exclamation mark warning sign. It means you should be on the lookout for some hazard. They're all over the south island.

IMG_0362.JPG
 

glitch

Mapping the next ride...
Staff member
Good stuff!


Any chance to either reduce your pic sizes before uploading...or link to a smaller version if that's possible on Photobucket (as it is with SmugMug etc).

The pics are HUGE and once there's a whole page full of them, will take ages to load.
It makes anyone looking into the thread download hundreds of megabytes PER PAGE! (each single pic is ~13mb!!) ....before the forum software knocks them down to 1600 width to actually make them screen-usable, which requires even more time as the entire image has to be downloaded first before it can be processed. Multiply by ....50? images per page!

For comparison, to download a single one of the shots above takes the same time as downloading about 40 pics in Doug's yarn.

You somehow got that first pic down to 960 width, which loads instantly.
 

Williamson

Part of the furniture
It's an exclamation mark warning sign. It means you should be on the lookout for some hazard. They're all over the south island.

I'd figured that, but don't remember them on the South Island.

Any chance to either reduce your pic sizes before uploading .....

Pics taken with Canon, stored on and then loaded from SD card to laptop hard drive, loaded into Photobucket, then share link put on AusTouring. Same process for all, I'll check though.
 

glitch

Mapping the next ride...
Staff member
Just right-click the first pic in the thread (Helen Place) and choose: "View Image Info"

Size shows as : 157.28 KB (161,057 bytes)
Dimensions : 960px × 720px

Scroll down to the later pics:

Like this one:
https://oi643.photobucket.com/albums/uu159/williamson_photos/NZ April 2019/IMG_3832_zps38khibqi.jpg


Size shows as : 11,769.31 KB (12,051,772 bytes) (which is over 70x the size of Helen Place!!)
Dimensions : 5,184px × 3,456px

The "scaled" size is what the forum software has done to it AFTER it was downloaded at full res from Photobucket.

Doesn't Photobucket offer an option to link the same pic in different resolutions (and therefore file sizes)?
Or resize the res/ file size at time of upload?
SmugMug offers 4 or 5 different resolutions, with a separate link each.
Don't know about Flickr....Imgur offers 3 sizes, Google knocks them down to 1080 width on upload unless you want to use their "big-file" quota.




My picxs out of the Panasonics are all around the 5-8mb off the SD-card....I then quickly batch-resize them with one of the many free resize tools
(i.e. 600 pics take about 30 seconds processing)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jpg+batch+resize+&t=ffsb&atb=v110-1&ia=web
before uploading to the photo-site.
IrfanView is a free piece of software that does batch rename+resize all in one hit...as well as handle nearly any grafix format on the planet.

This way I get fast uploads.... as well as quick-opening pages with lots of photos.
 

Zuckerbaron

Tour Pro
Hi Pete, I think you should copy your last two posts and put them into FAQ or somewhere as an information. Makes it easier for newbies like me.


But now I like to see more from the North Island, thanks for taking he time to post.
 
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