New Zealand Interstate

Enroute Dunedin, NZ

The Great Kiwi Roadtrip continues!!


We make it a habit of reporting things to the highway patrol.  This mostly started when Tiffany and Greg’s Mom teamed up on him and forced him to quit stopping for motorists on the side of the highway.  If someone looks like they are broken down but not in immediate danger, they reasoned, it is much safer simply to use a cell phone to report it to the highway patrol than to stop in the middle of nowhere and put yourself at the potential mercy of a carjacker.

The reason we bring this up is when we called in a broken down car to the NZ police, they asked us where it was.  To which Tiffany replied that it was on the interstate southbound a few kilometers from whatever exit we had just passed.

Tiffany was very proud of herself, incidentally.  Using kilometers in conversation.

The police operator chucked and immediately asked if Tiffany was from the States.  A bit confused, (she’d used kilometers!) she replied, “Why, yes.  Did you guess that from my accent?”

New Zealand give way sign

“No, this is New Zealand.  We don’t have interstates here.”

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The Power of “Go”

Auckland, NZ

We decided to buy vs. rent because the cost of second-hand cars was really cheap and we figured out that by renting we stood to probably spend more than outright buying and the cost of insurance was very low (finally, an upside to being over 30!!).  Most importantly, owning the car we gave us the power of go, which was critical if we were playing host in a foreign country.

20101206 (5) - NZ license plate - dimwit

Really?  Really!? 

Dude, there’s a reason this vanity plate was available.

The power of go was discovered by Greg several years ago.  As Greg never owned a car before his senior year in college, he spent his high school and university years dependent on someone else (friends, buses, and the ever-loyal Cal train) for transportation.  Upon getting a car Greg realized that he no longer needed to have a plan when he wanted to do something, which is what the “power of go” is:

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Boatless Transportation

Auckland, NZ

With Greg’s mom on the way we realized we had a problem we had managed to completely avoid on our journeys until now: how do we get around?

It sounds odd but for the past several years and about 1/3 of the way around the world our method of day to day travel simply was not a concern.  When working on sailing yachts our office also happens to encompass our primary means of locomotion and accommodation.  As we sailed wherever our captain wanted and stayed as long as they wanted to, we didn’t put a lot of thought into where we would be going or how we would get there.  We just took the ship safely wherever we were told when we were told to do it.  Being land bound now we had to face such difficult questions like, “Where will we go?”  and “Where will we sleep when we get there?”  and the most urgent of these, “How will we get there?”

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