Pōhutukawa (metrosideros excelsa) flowers at Mission Bay, Auckland, December 2023.

And what have you done?

When I announced (with great regret) at the end of 2021 that I would no longer be sending Xmas cards, I also suggested that as a substitute, I would like to start a new Xmas tradition of creating an end-of-year web page, illustrating the highlights of the preceding 12 months. The page announcing this was itself, in a way, the first such end-of-year summary, but of course that year was 2021 and we were all still caught up in the COVID-19 travel restrictions, so there was very little to report.

Like most of my ideas relating to this web site, the reality hasn’t matched the initial aspiration, but this year I have a bit more free time available to put together a summary of the highlights of 2024, so here goes!

I had visited Colorado many times during the 8 years I lived in New York, but I was aware that there was a lot more to the state than the few places I had seen. My employer at the time had paid for visits to Denver, Colorado Springs and Boulder, but those three cities are all on the eastern edge of the Rockies. The whole western half of the state – undoubtedly the more scenically varied half – was completely unknown to me.

I have a friend who lives in Denver, and I was delighted to find that he didn't need any persuading to plan a road trip – which ended up being two road trips – around that large area of the US that I barely knew.

Needle Rock, near Crawford, CO – this was just one of many volcanic plug outcrops we saw along the way; these are formed from the magma column of an ancient volcano, left exposed when the softer rock surrounding it erodes away. (And note the snow in the background – this was mid-May, but there was still a lot of snow on the higher peaks.)

The vacation consisted of three distinct parts:

• We first set off on a trip round the western half of Colorado.
• In between the two road trips, I spent about five days in New York.
• And for the second major road trip, we went down to the southern part of New Mexico.

I remember thinking at the outset of the trip that if we saw only 80% of the things we had planned to see, it would have been a great success. In fact we saw everything on our list and more, making it a truly wonderful (literally – full of wonders) vacation.

Unfortunately, my next vacation – my trip to the UK – turned out to be problematic in more ways than I could have imagined.

Well, it’s not new in 2024, but I haven’t mentioned it here before. I got an electric car in late 2023 – a Cupra Born.

There are tax incentives for electric cars in Australia that I’m taking advantage of, but even without all that, I just love driving it.

One point that you may have noticed in these pages – there are no photos (or even names) of the people with whom I shared the experiences. The pages are publicly accessible, and not everyone would be happy to have their faces and names – or those of their children – broadcast for everyone to see. I am thinking of adding authentication controls to the site, so that pages containing personal information could be hidden behind a login and password, but that may take some time.