It’s time to do down under! This summer was an absolute blast – so much traveling around and in the US, for both of us – although obviously I traveled even more than Dwight, with the Not a Pedestrian Life American Identity Tour taking me to 29 states in 29 days! We’ve also been waiting for my permanent Green Card to arrive – which was what prevented us from heading to South Africa for the Two Oceans Marathon earlier this year.
But, we’re almost there! And we are hoping that the new card will arrive in time for our next adventure. This time we’ll get to go together – which is awesome in and of itself. As much as I love to travel solo, it’s always fun when #teamrabe is on the road!
So where to next?
I am excited to share that we are heading to the Southern Hemisphere – to New Zealand and Australia.
Antipodean Adventure 2017
While Dwight will be running the Kepler Challenge – a 60km trail race – near Te Anu, on the South Island of New Zealand, we also hope to explore Milford Sound, Queenstown, Wellington, Wanaka, Christchurch and Auckland among other places. We are really looking forward to seeing quite a bit of Dwight’s family while we are there – it’s a big family so believe us when we say that this will be an amazing way of seeing quite a bit of the country in the process.
After NZ, we’ll be heading to Australia. We will end up in Northern New South Wales for Christmas, but we’ll still figuring out our itinerary for the rest of our time. There will likely be some combination of Brisbane, Cairns/Kuranda, Newcastle, Tamworth, Canberra, and Sydney. We always said that we’d try and see a new city together each time we went back to Australia but we’re not quite sure how that will work. Yep, you can definitely say that we are still working out the details!
As for other parts of this journey:
There might be a coffee challenge involved – if Dwight has his way! He wants to find the best coffee he can in both New Zealand and Australia, while I will settle for wine, olive oil, and great seafood.
I will be working on the road for at least part of this journey – and trying to figure out how to do that effectively while traveling internationally. Our goal is to share a post each day during this trip. There will be some planning to go into that – but it was so much fun to connect with y’all during the Adventure around America; maybe I can even get Dwight to record some video with me!
Here is a round up of articles about this trip down under:
Not a Pedestrian Life’s Antipodean Adventure 2017
Tapering and Thinking about Kepler
New Zealand – Kepler Track Challenge
Exploring Lake Manapouri and Te Anau
Race Report | Kepler Track Challenge near Te Anau | New Zealand | The Glorious Loop
Packing for New Zealand and Australia
Travel tips: flying from USA to Australia
Note:While I use it here in this article, and I am Australian, the phrase “down under” necessarily centers to northern hemisphere, and while down under is a commonly used phrase even in NZ, Australia and other areas of the antipodes the othering is still inextricable.
