NZ: overview of the New Zealand trip

For a month spanning some of November and December 2025, we visited New Zealand.

I (David) was born in New Zealand (NZ), and Jenn moved there in August 1994, and got permanent residency. We moved to the US in April 2001, where I later got citizenship; I’m a dual citizen of both countries. So I lived in NZ for about 32 years, and Jenn lived there for about seven years.

It’s a very long way, 12 hours direct flight, and very expensive (thousands of dollars) to travel between the US and NZ, so it’s not something we’ve done often. In fact, this was only our second visit since moving to the US. We (and Mom) previously visited NZ back in December 2010 for a bit less than a month. We had booked another visit for March 2020… but then the Covid pandemic hit, and we canceled it about a week before departure. It took us another five years to get around to re-booking the trip, but we finally got back in November last year.

New Zealand is a nation of islands, with the two main ones imaginatively named “North Island” and “South Island”. In our 2010 trip, we just explored the North Island. For our 2025 trip, one of the goals was to also explore the South Island, as we hadn’t previously spent much time there, despite much of the most famous scenery being down that way.

Another goal was of course to spend time with my family, especially my Mum and her husband Brian, my brother Neville and his family Karan, Michael, and Deanna, and my brother Gavin. (Fun fact: Jenn’s mother is “Mom”, and my mother is “Mum”, so it’s never confusing which mother we’re talking about!) Plus visit with other extended family.

A third goal was to take the RV lifestyle to NZ, and try traveling around and living in a campervan, as opposed to staying in hotels, motels, Airbnbs, etc (as we had booked for our canceled 2020 trip). Much smaller than our 40-foot motorhome!

We planned our US travels to be in Los Angeles, California before our trip, so we could take a direct flight from LAX to AKL (Auckland). But first, we boarded our cat Paladin at a nice cattery, stored our coach, parked our truck at (very expensive) airport parking next to a hotel, and stayed the night at that hotel, so we wouldn’t have to worry about timing on the day of the flight.

When we arrived in Auckland, we spent a couple of nights staying with Neville and family in Auckland, then picked up the campervan south of Auckland, and drove it to Mum’s place in Tauranga for another couple of nights, taking that opportunity to set it up. Then we headed south, typically staying only one night at each location. We stayed in a lot of places, did a lot of driving, ate a lot of tasty food, and saw a lot of very scenic things.

Here is a map of NZ, showing our travel route from when we picked up the van until we dropped it off:

We started in the north of the country, south of Auckland, and headed generally south to the capital city of Wellington, then across Cook Straight between the two islands in a large ferry. In the South Island, we went to near the tip of the island, then made our way south through Christchurch, back inland to Mount Cook, on to Dunedin and Invercargill, then north to the very scenic Te Anau and Milford Sound, looping back to Queenstown, heading north up the west coast to Hokitika, then over Arthur’s Pass back to Christchurch. There, we dropped off the van, stayed a night in a hotel, then flew home via Auckland (CHC to AKL to LAX).

Here’s another variation of the route map, that shows the different regions of the country:

That’s probably enough background info.

There are various ways I could blog about all this, but I decided that my usual format of separate posts for each campground, travel day, and each attraction would be way too much. I thought that perhaps the best way to cover everything would be to have separate posts for each day of our trip, so typically starting with leaving a campground, our travel and sightseeing along the way, and arriving at another campground.

Stay tuned over the next several weeks for hopefully fascinating posts about our travels in NZ! New posts every weekday.

Note that we start with the hotel and flights, some family time and scenes around Auckland, before getting to picking up the van and starting exploring. If you just want scenic NZ pics, you might want to skip the next few posts. Or follow along for the full experience.