The best down time I’ve had on this trip so far was a visit to David and Sally Kibblewhite (who had been my teachers at Woodstock School) in their beautiful home in Opotiki, on New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. The weather was beautiful: I finally got to see some sunshine after days of clouds and/or conference rooms. But there was something strange and unsettling about the light. Was my body, tuned for the high sun of the northern hemisphere summer, rebelling against the return to short winter days? Or was it that the sun was on the wrong side? I never did figure it out. I also would not have said that I knew much about the night sky, but that, too, looked wrong. I did finally see the Southern Cross, which included the brightest star I’ve ever seen in any sky, anywhere.
