Travel: Northwest Jersey, An Autumn Weekend

~ Laura

Last weekend was a day longer, because Ian had a day off from school for Columbus Day, and Steve had off for Canadian Thanksgiving. We took some lovely day trips around our northern section of Jersey. The leaves haven’t started changing yet, but there are little peaks of orange and red in the distance.

Published by Laura

7 thoughts on “Travel: Northwest Jersey, An Autumn Weekend”

  1. Very pretty!

    We were supposed to invite a few of the 3rd grader’s friends over for a playdate/b-day party this past weekend, but I got a mystery bug that turned out to be a sinus infection. Everybody seems to finally be getting sick with non-COVID bugs.

    We’ll be hosting several little girls next weekend for a playdate/b-day party. We haven’t had a real party at our house in 19 months. I’ll probably have the girls paint little pumpkins and play on the zipline. Today I brought (store-bought) mini-cupcakes to school for the entire 3rd grade. The pumpkin spice ones were a big hit with the little girls.

    Fall birthdays are kind of awesome.

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  2. Laura tweeted, “The college kid needs a recommendation from a professor for a study abroad program.”

    I’ve been meaning to mention that Hometown U. has been heavily advertising their New Zealand (!) study abroad program. I keep wondering if that is a good idea.

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    2. Depends on when it is slated to go ahead!
      Right now, the chances of getting a space in managed isolation (14 days mandatory – regardless of vaccination status) are pretty close to zero. Since there are strictly limited numbers of places available – and 30K+ Nz passport holders competing for them every month.
      It’s a major scandal, and the govt is now being challenged in the high court for breaching Kiwis right to return to their own country.

      However, there are rumblings that the government may *finally* be willing to open up to self isolation (which basically means that the rich can isolate at home, with grocery deliveries, for 14 days, instead of being stuck in a hotel room.

      Our tourism industry is all but begging on bended knees for the Govt to give *any* date when the borders will open again. There’s airy fairy talk over gradually opening up in 2022 – but no one is willing to put anything in writing.

      NZ covid Delta rates are trending upwards -here in Auckland – since the govt accepted that (in Auckland at least) suppression was dead in the water. Though there’s a (supposedly) hard border around Auckland to protect the rest of NZ.
      They seem to have missed the fact that drug dealers, prostitutes and criminals have zero intention of following the rules (they sure don’t follow them in any other way) and remaining isolated – and Delta spread widely throughout the gang and criminal communities – we recently had a case of a couple of prostitutes illegally making a trip through the Auckland border, to Northland – spreading Covid with them wherever they went (talk about an awkward discussion with your family – about why you need to go and get tested!)
      Once it became evident that Covid Delta continued to spread between households, even in stringent lockdown, they lost the popular mandate to continue total isolation. I doubt we’ll ever have a full lockdown again.

      Govt is now pinning all hopes on a high vaccination rate. They’re pushing for 90% (of all people over 12) I have my doubts that that’s achievable – I think there is at least 10% of the pop who are highly vaccine resistant.
      NZ is entirely pfizer vaccine – so double shots needed.
      And the govt have shortened the window between them to 3 weeks again (best medical advice for maximum effect was 8 weeks) – to try and get the numbers as high in the short term as possible.

      They’re really concerned about lockdowns over Christmas – as a massively unpopular move (and highly likely to be ignored, since Christmas is the middle of our summer here – no one is going to sit inside instead of going to the beach.

      So, unless your college student trip to NZ is in the latter part of 2022 – I’d be highly doubtful it will go ahead.

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