These are the conclusions of various and assorted people that are distant to intimate acquaintances. When I say acquaintances I mean friends, family and the local hairdresser. They are drawing these conclusions because we decided to pack up all of our belongings along with our two cats and move to the other side of the world.

We started down this path without much encouragement from people we know.  Many of them questioned not only our sanity but our fortitude and this made us all the more determined. Perhaps “determined” is not the right word. Something more like “anxiety-ridden” might be appropriate because we were scared, we still are.  But now that we’re here we’re really glad we did what we did…we think.

My wife and I aren’t prone to making rash decisions about anything. Well, I am more than she (my purchase of a 1972 Ford Pinto is a good example), but we aren’t known for doing many wild things where we come from.  We are good, stable, church-going kind of people. Our biggest adventures include travelling to island countries surrounded by bathtub temperature water, donning wet suits, heavy tanks of air and diving into the warm water to swim with the odd manta ray and sharks. Come to think of it we can understand why, to the casual observer, some might think we’re nuts. But in our little world we feel pretty normal.

We’ve both been lucky enough to have travelled a bit Because of her job, my wife’s seen even more of the world than me. One day while we were thinking about where to go on our next holiday vacation she mentioned that she had visited a place that to me was in a distant galaxy far, far away.

Today we’re living that dream…living in the Land of the Long White Cloud.  As it was shot entirely on location, the success of the movie trilogy “The Lord of the Rings” has brought a new awareness of this tiny country to the rest of the civilised world.However most people still know little about it and neither did we.  But we gave up almost everything we knew to become residents in this foreign land, no small step for this man and womankind!  We are probably like you in many ways and neither one of us ever imagined that we’d become expatriates until only a few months ago.  It was a tough, emotional decision that turned our world literally upside down. It’s been a real rollercoaster ride of agony and ecstasy and it’s not over yet and likely never will be.

We’ve learned a lot, made some mistakes and looking back might have done some things differently. We both owe a debt of gratitude to the many people we met along our journey, both in person and in “cyber space” and feel that it would be good Karma to give back a bit. So as time goes on we plan to write about our experiences, the thrills and spills, in the hope that others that follow in our footsteps won’t find anything unpleasant on their shoes. Our experiences may also cause others to wisely stay safely inside their houses and never venture out again!

Information On Emigrating To New Zealand