Travel

Countdown New Zealand Day 31

05/06/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

Plane tickets have been purchased. We are moving back to New Zealand. If all goes as planned, we will be on the ground there this time next month. It all seems hard to believe. So far away and yet so close. The pressure to start packing up is mounting. I’m looking forward to sloughing off a lot of the baggage I’ve been carrying around for years, but the question is will I? When it comes down to the wire, will I finally put that threadbare t-shirt imbued with memories of a race long since run into the trash or will I simply be able to let the thoughts remain as I let the object go? I’m about to find out.

Searching for Home

01/25/2019 by John 1 Comment

The first year is hard. That’s what other Americans have told us. They said it took them five years of living in New Zealand before home meant here and not there. We are not even seven months in. Sometimes it feels like the time is flying, at other times crawling. Why are we here? It is breathtakingly beautiful. I like the sociopolitical system better than what currently exists in the United States. People seem happier and friendlier. Are these good enough reasons to call this place home?

Lately, an unconscious silence between Mary and I about discussing going home has lifted. My thoughts are filled with the logistics of going home. I sometimes dream about going home. We said we’d give it a year and it’s barely been six months. We said we’d give it a year, but I don’t think we ever actually agreed on anything. Kind of like we were never explicitly clear about why we came here in the first place. About the best reason we can come up with is that we did it “because we could” and because at some earlier point in life we said we wanted to move to New Zealand. But did “we” say any of this or was it just me? Sometimes it’s hard to untangle the wants and desires of the couple from those of the individual.

Home. I always refer to back there as home, though when I was there, I often felt homeless. Will I ever feel at home anywhere? Sometimes I glimpse it in the quiet spaces when my mind is still. I see it in the sunrise. I feel it when I am in the presence of love and laughter. I know that home is not a place. It is a way of being, one that I have difficulty maintaining during the tumult of everyday life.

One Week In New Zealand

07/13/2018 by John 1 Comment

View across Lake Taupo of the volcanic peaks of Tongariro National Park

We have been in New Zealand for only a week, yet it feels far longer than that. Time seems to behave differently when you are displaced so dramatically in space; it bends and stretches, distorts, and elongates. Life in the states already feels like a distant memory, yet I know that as soon as I step back off a plane into some could-be-anywhere terminal back in the U.S., it will feel as if I never left.

What is there to say? Do you want to hear about our flight into San Francisco and our dramatic ascent up and away from the runway and having it explained nonchalantly by the pilot that there was “traffic” in the area? How about our business premier flight abroad Air New Zealand (paid for with airline points, not real money)? Sorry, not much to say about that because I was asleep for most of it on my seat that turned into a bed. Do you want to hear about how there are “four seasons in a day” here? Yes, it’s true. On any given day since arriving we have experienced some combination of brilliant warm sunshine, cold biting winds, rain of varying degrees from a light mist to a torrential downpour, and the occasional bit of hail.

Business class seat in lounger mode

I wish I could give you more than words. Words don’t justify it. I can’t make them as vivid as the slanted winter sun tinted landscapes of forested hills and pastureland we drove through after landing in Auckland. Words aren’t as dramatic as the snow clad visages of Mount Tongariro, Ngauruhue, and Ruapehu looming over Lake Taupo. My words can’t fully convey the kindness we have felt from so many people since arriving here, from the grocery store clerk who helped us set-up our new phone plan, to the friends we have know for 20 years, to the people we are staying with in Wellington, who were total strangers to us just a few short days ago whom we now can call friends.

There is much I will remember about our first week here, but one thing that struck me was a feeling I had driving through the countryside on one of the two-lane roads that pass for interstate highways here. It was a feeling of familiarity and comfort. It was the feeling of being home.

Looking down on Wellington from Mount Victoria