Getting Ready
We've been planning a trip to New Zealand for years. It's one of those things that seems so far out of possibility that you just talk about it saying, "Someday, when we go to New Zealand..."It's not real, but we talk about it because the idea is fun, and everyone tells us it's amazing and we should go.
The reality of planning an actual trip to New Zealand for the last 4 weeks has been a much more exciting experience. It's been one of the smoothest trips I've ever planned, and I've enjoyed it so much more than some of the other trips I've helped plan.
I gave my notice at work, scheduled the start date of my new job, and immediately tried to decide what we'd be doing and for how long. After deciding New Zealand was the top of the list of places, and getting the OK to take a bit of extra time off before starting, and we were ready to start planning. We got lucky and grabbed round trip tickets during a big sale push Air New Zealand is doing, picked our days, and started building the trip.
The planning was a lot of talk at first. We didn't know what the actual process of booking everything was going to look like. People we knew who lived or had been to New Zealand had told us that an RV was the way to go, but at an average of 250$ a day, we could have stayed in a nice resort somewhere for the same price. The cheap RVs were too small for our every enlarging family (and my legs) so we couldn't go the cheap route that way. We didn't want to just rent a minivan and do a road trip, since the kids don't take well to massive change all the time, so we decided a compromise made sense.
After searching for a long, long time, I discovered that the RV companies usually rent RVs to people in Auckland and people want to drive them to Christchurch, on the southern island, where they fly home and leave the RV there. Instead of paying the premium to take the RV one way away from Auckland, they give a huge discount to take the RV back. The cost of the flight was the same, so we decided to fly to Christchurch, rent the RV there, and drop it off in Auckland. This worked out well with our travel dates, and by working around their schedule we got our daily rate closer to 100$ a night, which was within our grasp for a vacation. We'll have to do cooking and eating on the cheap, but we get to go.
With the end of the trip scheduled tentatively in an RV, we just had 11 days left of the trip to actually plan. We decided 3 days to experience Auckland and get over the jet lag sounded like a good plan and that left 8 days. We decided to rent a minivan to get used to driving on the other side of the road, and to tour the middle part of the northern island. We'll be doing all of the typical NZ stuff—Hobbiton, glow worm caves, hot water beaches, etc. I'm pretty excited.
Regardless of how the whole thing turns out, I feel we've capitalized on our family's strengths—road tripping, eating whatever is in front of us, and traveling to cool places!
