Tag: New Zealand

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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?”

Continue reading “Boatless Transportation”

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Map of our trip

Ok, BIG announcement here everyone.

After a cubic butt load of work on Tiffany’s part and a few weeks of strangling the wordpress though island internet servers until it gave us what we wanted,

We can now present to you,

In all it’s oceanographic glory,

Along with geo-locational hyperlinks for all our entries,

(Ooooooo how completely awesome does that sound!?!)

THE MAP

(no, not the chart.  It’s not to be used for navigational purposes.  Who in their right mind uses google maps to navigate?)

View CoastGuardCouple.com – Tiff and Greg Around the World! in a larger map

You can click on the green pins to find posts related to that area.

Our current location is denoted by a green arrow and star.

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Kiwis on Water Skis

Auckland, NZ

Having completed our assorted obligations to hearth & home, we returned to a much warmer New Zealand a few months later.  As our winter is their summer, that worked out in our favor.  Tiffany would like to point out that it was “warmer” vice simply “warm.”   She is sensitive to such things.

Since we had a week before Greg’s mom arrived to join us on our adventures in Kiwi-land, we decided to take up some of our new friends on their offer to teach us water skiing.  We met Chris & Jo while we were in Tonga, which incidentally would have made a much warmer aquatic instructional environment but see they’re Brits by birth, so we just had to do it the hard way or at least the non-tropical water way…which supposedly helps the stiffness of our upper lips or something…

Continue reading “Kiwis on Water Skis”

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Is it worth it to go home?

Enroute San Jose, CA, USA

It provides us with endless amusement that after all the places we’ve sailed to, all the countries we’ve travelled around by boat, that we’ve flown into and out of Auckland, New Zealand…the “City of Sails.”

Sometimes we just enjoy being contrarian because we can be.

There comes a moment of truth in every long-term traveler’s trip when they are forced to confront a simple question with a heck of a lot of implications:

“Is this worth going home for?”

Continue reading “Is it worth it to go home?”

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Breath Test FAIL!

Auckland, New Zealand

Since the topic of drinking came up a few times over the past few entries let’s let Greg share with you a little story about something that happened to us in New Zealand and an important lesson he learned from it:

Greg: Remember how we got this amazing invite to have Christmas with a Kiwi MasterChef contestant and his family?

So yeah, duh, we did that.  This dinner lasts several hours.  Several.  As we’ve said, Kiwis are really nice people and if you befriend a really nice person and they invite you over for a feast…well you should expect to be there a while.  At the very beginning of the afternoon I had 2 glasses of wine with everyone.  After that, I called it quits because I was the one who was going to drive us home that evening and you know, better safe than sorry right?  Besides, they had Coke Zero so it’s not like I was deprived or anything.

20101224-NZ-road-trip-w-Ronni-4 Christmas treeLike I said, we were at this dinner party for a long time.  We had hors d’oeuvres, we had dinner, we had dessert, we talked, we mingled, it was great.  Everything you could possibly want as a traveler invited into the home of a local for Christmas.  Hours flew by.  Tiffany even made key lime pie from scratch, or perhaps I should say from crumbs, as you previously saw I was involved in that.

So it’s pushing midnight before we’re ready to leave.  My mother, who has joined us for the holidays, asked if I’m Ok to drive.  It wasn’t a reflection on how I’m was acting or anything, it’s just my mom.  She asks.  She’s proactively safe and good like that.

“Yeah mom, I’m fine, I haven’t had a drink since before we had food and only 2 glasses then.”

Continue reading “Breath Test FAIL!”

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Looking for a Good Time

Auckland, New Zealand

So when you’re done eating ridiculously good food and celebrating the holidays by watching explosives detonate over the main business district for New Years or just strolling around and being overtly assaulted by the beautiful scenery and cornucopia of pleasant scents …what do you do for fun in Auckland?  What would an Aucklander do if they were bored and looking for something to do on, oh say, a given Thursday evening?

Continue reading “Looking for a Good Time”

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First! FIRST!!

Auckland, New Zealand

Come on, how often do you get to call first on New Years? Well, if you’re a Kiwi probably about once a year but still, we’re American so it’s cool!

Sydney claims first and the world gives it to them but that’s hogwash. Auckland is closer to the dateline, so they have lawful first claim.

Also, Sydney has fireworks off a bridge over water (weak) while Auckland launches explosives off the Sky Tower which is right over their main city buildings…way more dangerous…which means way more cool!

Continue reading “First! FIRST!!”

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It’s the smell!

Auckland, New Zealand

Auckland just smells good.

Being people who grew up in cities, we got used to the smells that are a normal part of urban life: car exhaust, cleaning chemicals, in San Francisco the smell of cable car brakes is fairly common. Millions upon millions of people living closely together are going to generate smells. Most of them are not overly pleasant.

Auckland hasn’t yet hit that people to landmass ratio and there is an abundance of vegetation throughout the city. So as we walked around it was not unusual to stop suddenly, look at each other while sniffing the air and say, “wow, that smells amazing!”

Like we said, it was early spring when we arrived and while it was way too cold for Tiffany to think anything it its right mind would grow, apparently no one had told the Kiwi plants that.

Continue reading “It’s the smell!”

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Eating Kiwi Style

Auckland, New Zealand

With a population of about 1.3 million, the city of Auckland is the major city of New Zealand. It’s considered so truly massive that recent legislation has consolidated all the suburbs under one city government which is referred to as the “super-city.”

To give you some perspective on this Auckland is the largest city, by far, that we have encountered in the South Pacific. It makes the major French Polynesian city of Papeete look tiny (to be fair, that would be because it is by our standards). Even for Kiwis, Auckland is huge. As many people live in the city as live on the entire bottom, larger, island of the nation. The Auckland area contains a full quarter of the national population of New Zealand, a nation that by islander standards completely dwarfs everyone else out here. Heck, the number of people in this city alone dwarfs many of the countries we’ve visited. Remember how Niue has a national population of 1300? There are more Niueans in Auckland than in their entire home country! So by islander standards, this place is huge.

On the other hand, in the US Auckland would come in as the 9th largest city in terms of population, somewhere between San Diego and Dallas.

… and we’re fairly certain that if we picked up the city of Auckland and just placed it into the San Francisco Bay area no would notice anything unusual. One because the city is not all that big compared to the rest of the Bay and two the city and its people would just fit in that well. Continue reading “Eating Kiwi Style”

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A Kiwi Christmas

Auckland, New Zealand

You’ll be happy (or envious, probably both 😉 to know that by the time December rolled around down here we managed to get full swing into summer.

And while it’s not exactly Florida temperatures, the added sunshine mixed with a stubborn defiance of the weather that the Kiwis must have inherited from their British ancestors makes for another warm-weather festive season.

Continue reading “A Kiwi Christmas”

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