Ron and I returned from a ten-day trip to New Zealand today — our first visit to Aotearoa. The trip was a little ironic for me because I’ve been wanting to visit New Zealand for thirty years — but despite all that potential prep time this was a very last-minute affair.

Here’s the guilty admission: we’ve found that the only way we ever get it together to plan a trip is to buy the airline tickets first. Since the tickets are nonrefundable, we are then forced to sit down and plan things to do, or all the money spent on the tickets will go to waste. So several months ago we decided that we were going to fly to Auckland. Hawaiian Airlines has good rates and the flight from Honolulu only takes eight to eight and a half hours. The other advantage for us is that Hawaii and New Zealand time zones differ by only one hour — oh, and one day! Kiwis are nearly the first to greet a new day, and here in Hawaii we are nearly the last.

So we purchased our tickets and then…did no planning, nothing at all, for weeks. And weeks.

What can I say? We both get caught up in our day-to-day work, and we’ve both been extremely busy, but suddenly we had only about three weeks left before the trip. It was time to get serious. So we patched together a fairly simple itinerary, staying on North Island and splitting our time between Auckland and Tongariro National Park.

As those of you who visit my blog regularly know, I love to hike, and we did three truly amazing hikes while in NZ. I want to write about those over the next few days. We are thinking of visiting South Island next year, so if you have great hikes to recommend in that region please let me know!

More soon…