Ao Tea Roa Bound!

Well, the time has finally come and we are off to New Zealand for a fortnight.  We fly out of Kingsford-Smith airport at Sydney on Monday morning at some ungodly hour.  (8am).  We need to be ready to check in from 6:30am.  What a drag.  We are staying at a hostel the night before so we only have a twenty minute journey to the airport rather than a plus-2-hour one from here.

We are driving around the North Island for two weeks in a hire car, staying at YHA hostels.  There hasn't been much planning done, the itinerary will be devised on the go.  We are told there's plenty of stuff to do and we'll not get a chance to see the South Island if we want to properly explore the North.

Hopefully, I can manage to get access to the net sufficiently to blog most of the journey.  In any case, just about every YHA hostel has a few internet terminals in the front foyer.  We are going to take LOTS of pictures and we have the laptop with us, so blog posts can be typed up and then just cut and pasted online while at the internet cafes.  Hopefully I can manage to get some pics up as well, as that sort of thing will look interesting.

I have a gmail address where you can contact me if need be.  It is:

bustopher.deane@gmail.com    (God help me re spam posting that here.  Ah well.)

I cannot guarantee the regularity of posts for the next couple of weeks, but I can probably guarantee an increase in the interestingness!  This is my first real overseas trip (my parents & I did a cruise to Fiji, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and Noumea, New Caledonia back in 1979.  For that trip we didn't even need passports then.  Since I lost the opportunity for the Europe trip last year due to the ruptured oesophagus this sort of thing is well overdue and at last I can use the passport!