Hello beautiful readers.

It has been over 8 months since our wonderful American adventure. It feels like a lifetime ago. We have well and truly caught the travel bug. We finally finished putting together the second part of our highlights video from the USA. We are pretty proud of it and we believe that it does a decent job of capturing some of the magic from our trip.

We have a major international trip planned for 2019 but we are getting antsy and have decided to do a much smaller international trip first to scratch that itch. We decided that we are going to check out our third country together and Australia’s closest neighbour – New Zealand (only the north island). We are flying out on February 17 (one week after Ronnie’s 30th birthday). We are flying Air New Zealand from Sydney and landing in Auckland. We are on limited time so we decided (somewhat controversially) to skip Auckland altogether and head straight for Coromandel. We plan to move South through there over 8 days where we will fly out of Wellington. Our main destinations are Coromandel, Waitomo, Rotorua, Taupo & Wellington. 

This will be our first international trip where we are not using a tour company. We will be renting a car and doing self-guided travel. We do enjoy and appreciate the Contiki style trips but none of the ones available matched our timeframe so we decided to plan it ourselves. That is not to say that we will be changing our travel style on this trip, quite the opposite in fact. We have an absolutely packed itinerary. It will be early mornings, late nights and a million things packed in between. People have often said to us “wouldn’t you like a holiday where all you do is relax?” and the answer is no, not really. Our reasoning behind that is that we are adventure travellers. What we get out of travelling is not relaxation – it is adventure, chaos, sights, sounds, vibes, experiences and everything in between. We crave to experience everything that the world has to offer and we wouldn’t have it any other way. That is not to say that there will not be parts of the trip that won’t be relaxing, because there will be, but our pace is one of exploration, not relaxation.

This trip will mark a first for us in that we are not travelling alone. We are travelling with our friends Lorant & Bec. This is the first time that we have travelled with friends. It is something we have wanted to do for a long time. It is a risk, sure, but we are close with Lorant and Bec and we think that the time spent together will be good for our friendship with them. We believe in sharing amazing moments and memories and we hope to make some of them on this trip.

Much love,

Ronnie & Aimee.