Just over two years ago, we arrived in New Zealand not really sure what to expect or whether we would settle in this strange country where it’s not uncommon to see people walking around with no shoes on and where speaking the native language sounds like you could be swearing a lot of the time. Whatever we imagined, we didn’t expect to fall in love with New Zealand or to make so many amazing friends and wonderful memories. In the two years we’ve been here we’ve seen some of the most beautiful places on earth, we’ve lived beach-front and enjoyed the most amazing sunrises, swims and general beach living we could ever have hoped for. We’ve hiked on glaciers, volcanoes and mountains, been campervanning, camping and car camping (!), swam with dolphins, surfed at Piha, SCUBA’d at the Poor Knights, been whale watching (and inflatable whale rescuing for Lizzy), celebrated with the rest of the nation as the mighty All Blacks won against France in RWC 2011 (thank goodness!), enjoyed several trips to nearby Waiheke island with all its vineyards, had lots of BBQs, nights and days out and in short have made the most of every opportunity we’ve had. Whilst our time in New Zealand has been some of the best years of our lives, we’re both really looking forward to seeing family and our UK friends. We’re also looking forward to cold Christmases, proper pints (that’s for Alex not Lizzy), the BBC, good chocolate (thanks to all our dealers that have kept us supplied whilst we’ve been away 🙂 ), shorter days (none of this 8am start business), affordable decent clothes and shoes and generally seeing all the places that we used to go.
And have we changed much? Hmm… we don’t really think so but I guess it’s hard for us to tell in some ways – you’ll have to let us know what you think. One of the biggest things would have to be that Alex now knows what he wants to do for a career and has proven to himself that he can find work enjoyable and rewarding. That and we probably know quite a bit more about wines, say “sweet” often, call flip flops “jandals” and may have become more slack in our driving 🙂
So, here ends our time in New Zealand, now starts our time travelling back (and yes we really have time-travelled. We had a 40-hour 10th March) through South and Central America. Please let us know if you are on the blog e-mailing list from our travels over here and would like to be removed, otherwise we’ll keep sending you our blog entries as we go. If you’ve seen this on Facebook or on the blog itself and would like an email each time one comes through, also let us know. They won’t be as nostalgic (or probably as long) as this entry- we promise 🙂
Here are a few final photos of our last few days in NZ… we’ll be putting all our photos here on Picasa.
