One island down

Greetings from Wellington!

In the last 22 days, Byron and I have traversed most of the North Island of New Zealand. In our trusty camper van Wallace, we went up from Auckland into Northland, swooped back through Auckland on our way to the Coromandel, passed through Hamilton and Rotorua, hung out by Lake Taupo, visited vineyards in Napier, and finally headed down to Wellington on the very bottom of the North Island. Tomorrow, we’ll take the Interislander Ferry to Picton on the South Island, where our adventure will continue.

Highlights included: HOBBITON!!! Oh my goodness we saw Hobbiton and it was amazing and I wish I could live there and I took a million pictures but in the interest of not using up all of my data I will limit myself to including just a few.

Other highlight – we saw Narnia! Also known as Cathedral Cove, this is where they filmed the entrance to Narnia at the beginning of the second Chronicles of Narnia movie (Prince Caspian).

We’re now just over one third of the way through our camper-van trip, and getting the hang of Wallace-style living. We can turn the back from storage facility to sleeping cave in four minutes flat, cook anything on a camp stove, and use a dump station without soaking ourselves in dirty water.

In other exciting news – at the time of this writing, New Zealand has no active COVID cases. We’re now down to alert level 1, which basically means life as normal, except that the borders are still closed to non-Kiwis. There’s talk of eventually opening up a trans-Tasman bubble between NZ, Australia, and some of the Pacific Islands, but I don’t think that will be happening in the near future. In the meantime we’re all hoping that NZ has indeed stamped out the virus, but we’ll need a few more weeks of no new cases before we can be sure.

New Zealand continues to amaze us with its casual beauty. Even the most mundane of drives often takes us through rolling hills dotted with sheep, or along rocky coastlines with swooping gulls and beautiful blue waters. There are also plenty of freedom camping spots along rivers and beaches, though these get quite crowded on holiday weekends. Thankfully, Wallace is only a baby van, and where he fits, he sits!

We’re still missing our families, of course, and home, even with everything going on. It’s very strange to be on the other side of the world when so many sad and important things are happening. It feels like cheating, somehow, like we’re opting out of the experience of being in America right now, which has it’s benefits (re: exploring New Zealand, lack of COVID), but it’s hard not to feel like we should be home protesting or working to make things better in some other way.

Homesickness aside, New Zealand is an incredible place to be right now. Byron’s working holiday visa has come through (huzzah!), and hopefully mine will be approved soon. Those visas would allow us to stay for up to a year and earn some money if there are any jobs to be had. The earning money thing would be crucial, as between Byron visiting all the golf courses he can find, and me popping in to any yarn shop that’s even vaguely on our route, we’re rapidly losing both cash and room to move around in our van.

Either way, we have the cash and legal status to be here until at least late September, so the adventure is just getting started. Hopefully I can knit fast enough to finish a sweater and mittens before we go too much further south! Winter is coming.