We're Leaving Tomorrow!

'Nuff said!

New Zealand, here we come!

It's official: we are going to have a vacation longer than 3 days! Naturally, since we never even took a honeymoon, we are pretty excited. However, it occurred to me that some of you may not be able to recognize us when we return from our adventures, jetlagged, sunburnt (hole in ozone down there, remember?) wrinkled and worn.

So, here is a pre-vacation picture:

To make it easier to keep you all updated, I'm going to use this blog as my trip diary, including pictures.  Far cry from when we each used to carry spiral bound notebooks to journal our trips, and glue sticks to paste in postcards along the way, right? 

And, of course, my trip Karma is in good shape, even though it has been several years since the last travel:

1) Within days of when the first flight reservations were made, Christchurch had a 7+ magnitude earthquake, the worst in 88 years.  Most of the downtown beautiful old buildings fell down, and it will be years before all the infrastructure is repaired, BUT, only 3 people died. 

2) A couple weeks later, what the weather channel called the largest storm on the planet swept across the Tasman Sea and took out the entire west coast of New Zealand.  There were blizzards and deep snows and thousands of frozen lambs in the southern alps (it's spring there), and 4" of wet snow, trees down, power outages and chaos in the sub-tropical north.  Although, I did look at those pix from near Auckland the next day and it didn't look like more than a normal, maybe even good, winter day in Michigan.  But with palm trees.

3) As we were planning itinerary dates and modes of transport, we opted to use one of NZ's intercity bus companies...immediately after which decision, we discovered that one had crashed into a tree earlier this year. 

4) And only a few days ago, the domestic airline we will be using had yet another successful (everyone walked away from it) emergency landing (the pilots are evidently getting pretty good at these after several) because the nose gear keep falling off -- or something.

Now, I hasten to remind all of you that this Karma thing never happens to me during the trip.  It only frightens family members before I go anywhere.  Like that time we spent several weeks touring by train and bus through Mexico and Central America, and right before we left there was all this hoohaw about drug cartel killings and the US closed the boarder for a couple days.  Of course, we simply walked across at Calexico to the Mexicali train depot, with all the other pedestrian commuters...through a tunnel that didn't even have a guard posted to check ID. 

Never saw any of the purported guerilla warfare in Chiapas or Guatemala, either.  Did have the bus stopped once or twice during Easter week travel to check when crossing country boarders, but nobody ever asked us much.  I guess we didn't look dangerous, and we certainly didn't look like rich gringos by that time!

Okay.  Will endeavor to update this blog regularly.  I'm taking my computer with me, and the digital camera, and our hotels promise internet access.  Yeah, I know, but we'll see.