Traveling
We left Denver on Oct 25th, visiting my brother Matt and his family. I talk with him at least once a week, but haven’t seen them for a few years. They have a new son too. We had a great time spending a relaxed day just hanging out, playing games, and going to the community park.
All too soon we were on our 10:30 PM flight to Auckland. It worked out well because the ~12.5 hour flight arrived at around 8 AM Auckland time so there wasn’t much jet lag. The food and service was great and watching new movies on International flights is always fun.
Getting through customs was simple with just a minor delay while they checked our tent for mud, seeds, or other debris that could be transferred to their ecosystem. We hadn’t thought to thoroughly clean everything, which was our mistake. Fortunately, most of our stuff is quite new so we passed anyways.
We had a short wait for the bus, which gave us time to call Emily’s mom with our new New Zealand sim card for our phone. We also got to look around and observe things. Traffic was going the “wrong” way. Buildings looked like any other building and grass and trees looked about the same. The morning was comfortable in the sun except for an intermittent cool breeze that could make you shiver. Everyone we talked with was friendly.
We stayed at a YHA hostel, but got there hours before check-in. So we went shopping. We calculated needing 12 days of food with about 2 pounds of food per person per day. The short of it is that we spent about $240 on said food and I ended up with about 5 to 7 pounds more than Emily. Part of this is due to me bringing extra protein along. Part of it is me remembering the days of my cross country bike ride and wanting to eat all the things. And part is due to me wanting to carry a little more of a buffer in the beginning as we figure things out. In my conservatism, I’m a little concerned for Emily. However, the real hiker hunger won’t set in for a little while and we will have one or two opportunities to stock up at a small convenience store about halfway through the first leg.
One small hiccup with food was opening our box of stuff we brought with us and seeing that my breakfast smoothie mix exploded. I had taped it shut and it was still shut, but the pressure inside must have blown out the seals. I think that the powder must have captured a lot of air between the particles so that the volume of air was greater than it seemed. At any rate, many things in the box now smell like peach, even after I cleaned for 30 minutes.
Othere than food, we looked for gas canisters for the stove (which was fairly easy), silk liners for our bags (they didn’t show up before we left due to long delays with the US Post Office), and we mailed our “bump boxes” of extra gear and half our food to the halfway point of the first section. No success yet on the liners. The company is ironically based in New Zealand so hopefully we can come up with a fast solution.
Mailing the boxes was expensive… about $75. Makes you wonder how much we are really saving on gear, but I suppose half the effort is for convenience when you’re out in the middle of nowhere when gear breaks down. It feels like a sizable tax, though, on everything we buy and ship.
We did enjoy more New Zealand friendliness in shipping our boxes. The woman bustled around the store weighing things for us, helping us pack, taping things, and taking a genuine interest in what we were up to and making recommendations. I have been interacting with the US mail system quite a bit recently so I have a decent measuring stick. There are some great US mail employees and, even still, this woman went above and beyond.
Anyway, back at the hostel around 5:30 Emily just wanted to cuddle for the few minutes while we waited to go to dinner. We woke up about six hours later. Maybe we were more jet lagged than we thought… I woke up at 5 AM as I couldn’t stay in bed any longer and typed this up.
Today we are headed west to Kaitaia for the day and then we catch a bus to the starting point tomorrow in Cape Reinga. Very close to getting boots on the ground!