fail to plan....plan to fail

It's said that an hour of preparation for field work slices off several hours in the field. On that basis, I'm riding time savings in the weeks already. The logistics of this field research are complex and really rather challenging.

Trying to get me, case files, the appropriate council officers, landowners, weather and several other variables to positively converge on small windows of time (16 at least over 2.5 months) demands almost militaritic precision in planning.

However, the round eternal of labelling files and printing emailed information for those scary times when internet access and power connections for the laptop will not be accessible continues to gobble up most waking hours at this point. One week out from leaving, the perfectionist in me is not near-ready...and the laissez-faire hippy is nowhere to be found.

The first stop is beautiful Kerikeri, home of the delectable export quality orange and an area where coastal development has forever changed the division of land and sea. I look forward to having a good excuse to amble along South Pacific beaches and to enjoy what is likely to be the warmest leg (relatively speaking) of the journey.

The lovely climate of the Far North is likely to be elusive however so the car is being progressively stocked with enough raincoats, tarps, gaitors, boots, plastic sheets, bags and umbrellas to carefully safeguard a small Pacific nation from the scourge that is rainwater.

Now, best I get back to the labelling, the packing, the mapping, the planning and a not insignificant amount of fretting as the date of departure looms ever closer...