We got a text this morning, from the country of New Zealand, reminding us that our visas expire August 18th and that we should either get out, or renew them. Our flights are already booked for Sydney, Australia, August 12th.

It seems impossible as I’m sitting in front of a wood stove with a cup of tea, all comfy and warm, that we’ll be back in our backpacks and hopping a plane in just six short weeks. Where has the six months here gone? 

I can’t say enough how much we have loved New Zealand or how much I thoroughly recommend making your way here, getting hold of a camper van, and taking a nice long explore. It’s a country made to be driven, and drive it we have.

The Thunder Pig is in the shop right now. She’s having a tire changed and a leak fixed to certify her for the annual renew of her warrant of fitness. We’re happy it’s happening while we’re in a house instead of the RV! She’s been a great vehicle to explore in. In the six weeks we have left we plan to go snow skiing with friends (a novel idea for northern hemisphere people in July!) and then cruise up north of Auckland and tour through the last little corner of the country we haven’t seen at all.

Six months seems like a long time, and it is, but the take home message is always the same:

The longer we stay in a place the more we realize we have not seen. We’ve made leisurely passes through both islands, we’ve got a month to “go local” in this little community on Paraparaumu Beach, and we still feel like we’ve just barely scratched the surface. I guess that’s the thing we’re continually learning from travel; that the world is, simultaneously, a tiny and an enormous place. It’s possible in the modern era to “see it all.” And yet, when we have seen much we realize we’ve seen nothing. New Zealand is on our short list of favourite places on the planet, and we’d like very much to come back for another six months in the future.

Of course we’re getting excited for Australia too.

We are already plotting and planning with friends on the ground there for grand adventures. We’re over the moon to have tickets to the children’s very first opera: Verdi’s La Traviata, at the Sydney Opera House.  We’ll connect with some of our favourite backpackers, girls who spent Christmas in Guatemala with us a few years ago. They’re as excited as we are and are already planning dinner and taking time off from work to show us their corner of the world. I love that about travel: the unexpected friends we make, people who would rather spend Christmas in our casita than continue down into Honduras like they’d planned, and who then become life-long friends, with whom we connect on the far side of the world. After a whirlwind in Sydney, we’ll make the hop to Melbourne where we’ve got a house sit for a couple of months in a little beach town called Geelong.

Getting from Sydney to Melbourne is proving to be an adventure in logistics. At first we thought we’d buy a car and drive, its about 12 hours, which is a nice two day trip for us. Then we thought maybe we’d take the bus, or the train, but those options weren’t cheap (times six people!) We were surprised when we started searching airline information and discovered that flying is our most economical option! That almost never happens! And so, this leg of the adventure is brought to you by Cheap Flights! Of course it means we won’t have the lovely two day drive, but it also means that we can get to our house sit on time, and that matters too!

I know this sounds terrible to say right out loud, but our three month stay in Australia is already feeling like not enough time. We have friends to visit, work to do, adventures to have, and diving the Great Barrier Reef is non-optional. It’s a huge country and there’s no way we can see it all, but we’re hoping very much to make a dent on the East Coast.

What are your suggestions for the places we absolutely cannot miss out on?