We are off to New Zealand!!!!! This weekend me, my WH (wonderful husband) & my sister started planning our holiday to New Zealand that we will be taking in the middle of this year. This trip has been in the works for a couple of years now, since we came back from our trip to Cairns in 2009. At that stage I was working part-time & we thought that we could save up enough money pretty easy & go to New Zealand in 2010. We of course didn't know how our circumstances would change, and that I would lose my job & we would become a one income family.
Despite a reduction in income we decided that we still wanted to go, so pushed the holiday back a further year to give us twice as much saving time. And here we are......beginning of 2011 and officially planning & booking our holiday. So exciting!!!
Neither myself or my WH has been overseas, so we are also going through the process of getting our passports. We got the paperwork on Friday, had our photos taken on Saturday (they were awful photos!!!! But aren't all passport photos? Something about not smiling) & our wonderful Pastor signed our photos & paperwork as guarantor today. Worked out that I have known our Pastor for about 9years, wow!
We nutted out a rough plan with our Travel agent on Saturday, he was great loads of suggestions and ideas. We are using a travel agents that we used to book our Cairns holiday (though different branch), we weren't happy at all. When we arrived in Cairns we had nothing booked, airport transfers, rooms, tours...nothing. Thankfully I had our paperwork that proved that we had in fact paid for everything so the lovely people at the place we were staying booked everything for us. People told us they were surprised that things went so wrong, and that they had never had a problem with this travel agent but had used a different branch (the one that we are using to book this holiday). So far a vastly different experience (yeah!).
So our basic plan is the fly in Dunedin, drive to Queenstown, ski, then day trip to Milford Sound, back to Queenstown get a campervan (yep we are campervaning!) go to Fox Glacier, up to Greymouth, then into Hanmer Spring & into Christchurch which we will fly out of. That is the very basic plan, probably add a few more stops as we have alot of flexibility with having a campervan.
Now none of us have ever skied before, never even seen snow! So we are also shopping around for what we are going to need for the skiing portion of our trip. We are going to do a combination burrow, hire & buy. Our travel agent suggested investing in a jacket (one with a removable liner), and I have a friend who does a bit of snowboarding that I can burrow gear off, and we will hire what we can't burrow or justify buying just incase we don't like skiing.
It is funny, now that things have gotten rolling my mind has been turning to my travel journal. For our last couple of major trips I have kept a travel journal & also done a whole album about our holiday. This trip I will definatly be doing another travel album, not sure about another separate album (maybe digital!?) but we will see. Can't wait to share what I have descided upon travel journal wise.
Can't wait for this trip!!!!
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