It’s been a month and a bit more since we returned to the United States from Slovakia, which seems like a long time ago!
We scheduled our time here so that Chris could be here in Boulder to help her friend Sarah with the birth of her third child, a little boy named Diyar. He popped into the world on November 22, weighing 6 lbs. Welcome Diyar! Chris helped with the births of Sarah’s first two children, and so a tradition started. The kids call Chris “Auntie Chris” and she’s a regular fixture at their house, helping in all manner of household things while she’s here.
Now we have a bit more than a week until we leave again. A month is not a long time to see everyone and take care of the million deferred tasks at home, and a good deal of time has also been spent on planning the next months. We’ve spent a lot of money on airfares! If you look at the world map, you’ll see that we’ll be circumnavigating the globe (a first for me) leaving Denver for London, then on to Singapore for a few days, then to Brisbane, Australia for 2 weeks, New Zealand for 2-3 months, back to Australia and then Vietnam and potentially Laos. New Zealand and Vietnam/Laos will be bike trips, and so we’ll try to not become complete slugs while traversing the globe but it’ll be hard.
On December 7, we’ll jet off back to London and spend a few days there while Chris gets new lenses in her eyes, ending her eternal search of one of her many pairs of glasses. She’s so looking forward to clear vision!
On the next leg of travel, our “official” ticketed destination from Denver is Vienna, but we’ll attempt to get off the plane in London Heathrow with our checked luggage. We bought roundtrip tickets from Vienna to Denver when we were returning home in October, since it was less than half the price of flying one-way. But now we need to stop in London on our way back, instead of going all the way to Vienna.
One would think that the airline would be thrilled for us to give them back two seats from London to Vienna that they could sell, but the rules of airfares are not set up that way. It ended up being super expensive to change the flight to only go as far as London, even though we have to transfer in London anyway. And so, we’ll ask the agent who checks us in at Denver to put our final destination for bags as London, but if that doesn’t work, I’ll just go on to Vienna. I have a fully refundable $200 return ticket to London leaving from Vienna three hours after landing there, so I’ll just do a quick round trip back to London and meet Chris there. The $200 ticket was way cheaper than the $3,200 change fee, which is what it would have cost to change our tickets to just stop in London officially. Makes no sense but it is what it is.
We’ve had other flight scheduling issues, mostly with Qantas, who have been generally pleasant but incompetent. Alas, these are all first-world problems so I’ll just leave it at that.
Neither Chris, nor I have ever been to Singapore, so we are both looking forward to spending a few days there. We’ll be spending three nights in a hotel that is located inside of a giant shopping mall! I think it’ll be one of those experiences that will give us a vivid sense of downtown Singapore. After Singapore, we fly another nine hours directly to Brisbane, Australia, visiting with Chris’s sister Katherine and her husband Andrew for the Christmas holidays and New Year. We had originally thought to spend about a month there with a couple weeks traveling around Australia in January, but Katherine noted that it’s about the worst time to travel in Australia, being school vacation, the middle of their summer, and around the holidays! And so, everything is super expensive and hard to schedule on top of it. So we’ll stick around Brisbane and enjoy the warm weather and their pool. I think it will be very pleasant to be back in the warmth.
After Australia, we head to New Zealand! We’ll spend a few days in Auckland, exploring and getting our bikes set up. We bought new bikes from a shop in New Zealand a couple months ago while in still in Europe, wanting to make sure that we could get the bikes we wanted when we needed them. I was afraid of landing in Auckland and finding that the bikes we wanted were all sold last month. We’ve going to be bike-packing from the top of New Zealand to the bottom, generally following the 3,000 km Tour Aotearoa route, with some detours from the route to see some other areas that we are interested in.
The below video shows you some of the amazing sights we hope/plan to experience!
Planning for the trip to New Zealand has taken a fair amount of time, understanding transportation (ferries, buses, etc) that we’ll need at various junctures of the journey and road/trail surfaces. We’ve been helped by Wendy and Mike in the UK, who introduced us to some people in NZ who in turn referred us down the line until we talked to Kelvin, a 66-year old guy who had ridden the whole route in March of this year! He even invited us to stay at his house in Wellington when we pass through. Also, I’ve been in contact with ferry companies and private parties to share a chartered boat across Kaipara harbor. We’ll be camping most of the time, but also taking advantage of accommodations as they are available.
We’ve also been slowly assembling items for the trip. Some are borrowed, some are new and some are what we took on the last trip. We need to do a test-pack in the next couple days to make sure that everything will fit into the spaces we have for them. The weather in New Zealand should be warm as it was in Europe, but the temperatures will fall as we head south and as summer wanes, sort of like what we had in Brittany. We expect to have some rain too! Since we’ll be on trails as well as roads, we’ll be riding bikes with fat tires and packing our gear in different ways than when we crossed Europe. We need to keep the loaded bikes kind of narrow, so we plan to not use panniers since some suspension bridge crossings in NZ are too narrow for bikes with panniers. In addition, we plan to go from NZ to Vietnam, which also might have dirt roads and tracks that we’ll need our fat tire bikes for. The planning for that part of the trip is in its infancy, but we are basically planning on flying into Hanoi and riding in northern Vietnam and potentially into Laos.
And so…the planning continues, but we are getting excited to go. Looking forward to posting our new adventures as they happen.
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