A lot has changed since my last post here. We have decided to make our trip to New Zealand a bit earlier in the year, May 13th in fact. Surprisingly, Declan has decided that he doesn’t want to go on the trip and would rather not miss the school time. It came as a bit of a shock to Belinda and myself, but I respect his decision to put his schooling first (although deep down I feel there may be another reason we aren’t privileged to). Either way this meant that we could now go in the last part of Term 2, which will hopefully be a quieter time for the business as well as a few other benefits whilst we are on holidays.

Going in May means that we should have a bit more daylight each day and the crowds shouldn’t be so big either. We are planning on staying with Anne on Friday night in Brisbane as our flight to Christchurch is at 9:10am AEST. This will get us to New Zealand at around about 2:30pm NZ time. After speaking with the Motorhome people, we decided to stay the first night at the Airport and pick up the motorhome first thing on Sunday morning. We have also decided to do the same thing on the way home, giving us a chance to relax a bit before we head home.

The hotel we have booked looks quite nice. Hopefully it won’t be too loud; the reviews said it was nice and quiet.

We ended up with a pretty good deal on both the flights and the motorhome by doing it all online ourselves. We paid extra to reduce our liability for the motorhome, which brought it up to $2,430.10 NZD or about $2,320 AUD. We have been told there is another charge of $6.62 per 100km that goes to the New Zealand government as a diesel tax. So we could be up for another couple of hundred dollars at the end of the trip. All in all, we thought for less than $3000 was pretty good for car/home for 3 weeks.

The flights were well priced too. We are flying with Qantas and all up we paid $1400 for our return flights for all of us. We leave at a nice and respectable time of 9:10am from Brisbane and will arrive in Christchurch at 2:35pm NZ Time. Coming home we leave on the Sunday morning at a frighteningly early 6:15am NZ Time, which will mean that we will have to be up and ready at 3am. It won’t be too bad as that night we are staying in the Sudima Airport Hotel which is at the airport. Picking this flight though meant that the home flights were only $161 each (and less for the kids). This way too, we will arrive into Brisbane at 8:10am local time, giving us enough time to make it back to Toowoomba, rest and unpack before having to go back to school and work.

The kids are getting more excited each day, however they have said they wish they only had to go for 2 weeks. Hopefully once they realise how much fun it will and reality sets in that we are going on an adventure, they will be more excited. We have finished our passport applications and Belinda and I are going to submit them this afternoon. We the kids get their passports back I hope it helps them realise it won’t be much longer to wait.

Anyway back to work…