As of January 1st at 9:25 in the morning (New Zealand Daylight Time), we are on the ground in New Zealand!

That means that, as of the writing of this post, we’re at the end of our third day in the country. We’ve been updating the photos in our album (which you can see in the sidebar on the right of this here post, or at the bottom of it if you’re on a mobile device). Clicking on any of the pictures should get you to the whole album. But here are some highlights:

December 30: we brought a somewhat unhinged number of bags on the plane with us. And, amazingly enough, they all made it unscathed! …well, everything inside them did, at least. The bags themselves were definitely scathed.

The flights were pretty good, though: a 2½-hour flight from Indianapolis to Dallas, where our daughter found a beautiful floor mosaic, followed by a 15½-hour marathon of a flight from Dallas to Auckland:

 

…complete with raspberry sorbet and a ratatouille stromboli served basically right as we crossed the equator. I am not making that up, and I am also not entirely sure why. But it is interesting that they both have the initials R.S. (Maybe for “southeRn hemiSphere?”)

And then we were here! It’s been less than a year since we conceived of this plan. That is honestly crazy to me; I did not assume, on January 1 of 2025, that we would be living in Auckland exactly 365 days later.

The rest of January 1 was sort of a snafu, though; while customs went remarkably quickly—need I remind you of what all they had to look over?—we unfortunately had to deal with rental car headaches (it’s been 34 years since the famous Seinfeld scene at the car rental agency, how is it possible that none of them have ever improved? The ratatouille stromboli did!) and some really unfortunate phone-related shenanigans (note to self: next time you move internationally, make sure your phone plan does international data roaming). But we made it, and by that evening we were eating chinese food in our temporary airbnb.

January 2 was the day when we discovered that it’s actually kind of hard to take a bad photo in New Zealand. Even the sunrise outside our window looks like a nature documentary. This country is pretty.

We visited the playground and the beach in Mission Bay in the morning, before the day really started to get hot:

It’s hard to quantify the change that we encountered coming from the dead of winter to the middle of summer. Flip-flopping time zones is one thing, but getting a whole new lease on sunlight has done wonders for our seasonal affective disorder.

On January 3 3 January (as we’re going to have to get used to writing it), we explored a part of Cornwall Park, which is absolutely as iconic as any park in the United States:

Since we’ve been here, we’ve also seen:

  • Actual terrain! For Indiana born-and-bred people, mountains are quite a wonder in and of itself.
  • The “PAK’nSAVE,” a New Zealand grocery chain that feels like the unexpected offspring of an Aldi and a Kroger.
  • The Auckland Costco with its 2-level parking garage and its really smart cart trolley escalators travelators.
  • Some very urban, very walkable downtown streets.
  • A shopping mall food court with a sushi place, a crepes place, and a McDonalds.
  • Two thunderstorms.
  • Mount Wellington, an extinct volcano in the neighborhood of the same name.
  • A house with a name.
  • Dingle Dell Reserve, a “bush reserve” in the middle of the city with some really incredible walking trails.

Plus the people have all been very kind, the weather has been unbelievably good, and I’m already starting to get the hang of driving on the left side of the road!

All in all, this has been an excellent experience. I wholeheartedly recommend Auckland to anyone. Come see us! (And the city.)