Update 4th January 2017 – Happy to announce that the “mega rage face” status can now be retracted. The weather on the trip turned out to be kind enough to open up a few hours after arriving at Okaka hut, rewarding our climb with views including a spectacular sunset on top of Humpridge Track.  Thankfully the Computer modeled weather forecasts did not eventuate in their entirety!

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Yargh… Earlier in the week, saw the Tuesday 27th forecast appear around the corner and thought hopefully that it will go away.  Looking again today and much to my chagrin, I get presented with this…

It would be perhaps fair to remark “It probably doesn’t get much worse than this”.  (if weather conditions got worse, the operator would likely cancel the trip, refund us the monies and we go on our merry way to do something else)

Will pack my blue raincoat (the Swazi one) which seems to have an interesting ability to repel Rainy weather /s (as well as the regular poncho)

Rain itself I don’t mind (being rain falling on me), but simply going down there and climbing up 900m to simply see solid white / grey will likely drive me silently bonkers as it did when I did Waikaremoana and walked up the bluff only to see Stark White.

Yeah, If weather turns out to be shite and all I get is solid gray to see, I fully intend to go back down again at some later date (i.e before Christmas next year) and take up the chopper option up to the top, walk down and and do the River to Lake Jet boat (if they offer that activity combination as an option).

I’ve already forfeited my Farm Stay / Hunting Trip invite (from another circle of good friends) to attend the Humpty walk and it would be extremely disrespectful to fellow group companions to pull out. Here’s hoping that the computer modeled forecasts are wrong.

Finally bit the bullet and replaced the Jetpack Photo Carousel on both peak.nz and nui.nz with the one from dFactory.  The dFactory one after a little bit of testing offers a number of advantages …

• More Mobile Friendly.  Pictures can be made to display at Maximum Screen extents, better utilizing the real estate of a small screen.  The older carousel had some challenges where by the picture would appear very small.
• Support for zooming in on both Mobile Devices and Desktop.  Users Can now pinch zoom natively. (Using one of their pay plugins)
• Browser Back Button behaviour is more intuitive.  In the old Carousel, once you finished sliding through all the pictures, closed the carousel light box, and hit the back button (to go back to the front page / album listing), it would instead relaunch the carousel and show you the last picture.  Continue hitting the back button, it would go back through the photos you had just viewed (in reverse).  The dFactory lightbox eliminates this (at least on most browsers I’ve tested this plugin with)

So far, everything appears to be working pretty well. Will probably deactivate and remove jetpack in due course. Jetpack (as a whole) is good for certain sites, though probably too fully featured and some components of it too heavy for personal homepages like this one, I feel.