Up horrendously early, to get over to the airport before 6:30. Hopefully getting away a day earlier than the official start of the school holidays will help, I’d hate to see the place tomorrow or over the weekend.
A delayed, but uneventful flight. As we fly over the coast of New Zealand on our way to Christchurch, it amazing to see the snow covered mountains out the window of the plane. A little bit of a preview for what to expect in the coming couple of weeks
With the 3 hour flight and the 2 hour time difference it’s mid-afternoon when we arrive.
On arrival, it’s a cloudy and gloomy day. We’re picked up by the shuttle bus from the local motel we’ve booked into for the night. A nice dinner at their restaurant, then we get ready for what should be a busy day tomorrow.
Tomorrow we pick up the motorhome, which we have for 12 days, then we have a few more days unplanned at the end. We figure we’ll hire a car and see what happens.
This is the first time any of us have visited NZ (actually Justine has been to Auckland for work, but other than the airport and office saw nothing else), we’ve all had to get new passports! After viewing our options we’ve elected to do the South Island as that appears to be better for tourists and scenery. Some people think we’re nuts for doing the south Island of NZ in winter, maybe they’re right. We’ve got all the gear for the cold and hopefully we’ll see some snow, which the kids will love. It’s certainly a lot cheaper in winter, the motorhome is about 1/3rd the summer price, and hopefully it will be less busy too.
Speaking of motorhome, this will be our first time in a motorhome or caravan so it will be interesting if we cope in such a small space over the next two weeks. Having said that it’s a pretty flash motorhome imported from Germany, really well insulated with LPG heating, so we’re not exactly roughing it. The motorhome company had all these videos on how the different systems in the van work, so I’ve already feel I got a good idea on what I need to do.