Greetings!

Thanks for stopping by our website and checking out our trip.

Trip Background

I know what you're thinking... New Zealand??? Well, it's a semi-long story. We started off wanting to go to Australia, but with the long flight there, we were primarily interested in flying business class by using frequent flier miles (business class on Qantas through Continental Airlines is 105,000 points). We started asking questions to Continental about the process fairly early on. We learned that they open up the Qantas seats 11 months and 3 days in advance. We started calling in February because we thought that a trip sometime around December/January would be the right time. We were only able to acquire seats to Auckland, and we figured that was close enough. We could get ourselves to Australia. We had to call back a couple of weeks later for a return seat (remember the 11 months and 3 days thing?). So we started calling about the return seats. The only thing we could get were return seats four weeks later. So that makes this a four week trip! Oh my!

We were still thinking Australia, but if we were arriving to and departing from Auckland, we thought we should at least do something New Zealand related to wipe it off our list. We did some research and were quite surprised as to how much New Zealand had to offer. We went from spending 1 week in New Zealand and 3 weeks in Australia to 2 weeks in New Zealand to 3 weeks in New Zealand, and then finally the entire trip. By the time we finished the initial planning, we were crossing activities off our list because we just weren't going to have time to do them. It seems to do a proper New Zealand trip, one would need at least 2 months!

Trip Planning

When it's winter in Houston, it's summer in New Zealand (one of the reasons why we scheduled the trip when we did).

New Zealand has a lot to offer. It seems like if you're an outdoors type person, this is the place for you. White-water rafting? There are like a dozen places. Glaciers? Three major and a lot of smaller ones. Volcanos? Eighteen (no kidding). Beaches? All over the place (New Zealand is two islands, remember?). So this is just a little taste of what we had to go through planning this.

We started off with a list of the activities that we wanted to do. Volcano exploring, white-water rafting, glacier exploring, Zorbing (we'll explain this one on the Rotorua leg), black-water rafting (we'll explain this one on one of the other legs too), beach time, the underwater observatory in Fijordland, hiking, and just some general relaxing. We had to research where the best places were to do the activities we wanted. Then we got a map out and started plotting out our preferred activity locations. We decided (okay, maybe argued and negotiated) on how much time we wanted to spend where. One of the general travel rules that we have is that we have to spend more than 1 night at each location. This saves on just the general fatigue you can experience from having to keep unpacking and packing back up. We kept to this rule with one exception, Greymouth. We needed to cover a distance that was more than what we wanted to do for one day and needed a stopover.

With the exception of one phone call that Doug had to make, the rest of the planning and reservations were done over the internet and by e-mail (gotta love technology!!).

For the most part, Doug worked on finding lodging on the North Island and Travis worked on finding lodging on the South Island.

About the Website

We thought this would be a pretty good way for people to keep up with what we're doing. We were picturing coming back from this trip and have everyone ask us... What did you do on your four-week trip? Um....... Um...... Where do we start?

Travis actually did this on his Route 66 roadtrip back in 2000 with his friend Dean, so he knows it can be fun having people follow along. (You can still check out his Route 66 trip at http://fosterandfrye.com/route66.

We're not webmasters, so just remember, you get what you pay for. We've set up a page per stop and the links are over there on the left. We'll be updating it as we go and we hope to be posting a lot of really good pics. We'll even send you an e-mail when we update it if you want.

Thanks again for stopping by, and we'll be seeing you along the way ;-).