The trip I am currently on is very long, so I felt like the blog posts needed an umbrella title to tie them all together. Game of Thrones is long, so why not purloin that series title? DONE.
So for those who haven’t been in earshot of me in the last 18 months, then you don’t know that my company gives a sabbatical after five years of “service.” (I think it’s very odd to say service… like, it’s not for my country and girl is getting paid, sooooo…) This trip has somehow encapsulated all my desires, hopes, and dreams and was a very big deal to me personally. I’ve started writing this in the middle of the trip and it has been pretty amazingly epic #spoileralert so I think the title is warranted.
What will follow are a lot of blog posts. The won’t be cultural or tell you anything about the human condition, but they may be entertaining, so, if that interests you, I encourage you to keep reading. If you’re reading this as a travel blog and hope to learn something about Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, you will be sorely disappointed.
I have to say that as the time for this trip eventually crept up on me, I found it hard to believe. For years I have looked forward to exploring and adventuring through New Zealand, doing the “legendary” black water rafting and seeing Milford Sound. My last day of work, as I finished up emails and got things together, it felt surreal. For some reason this precipitated me taking a ton of pictures (one of my calendar notification, one of out of office notification on my work chat program) as if the photo evidence would make it real. But it is real. It’s here. And I’m sharing it with the world in prose form (lucky you).
I encourage you to sit back, relax, but also buckle up (trust me, I drove in NZ and you NEED to buckle up).
You think you know, but you have no idea. This is the story of Tedd (and Ernesto and Kim) in The South Pacific.