On the road: Van life begins!

If I’m totally honest, when I got home from the staff party at the end of the term, I wasn’t excited or relieved. I was anxious. Suddenly, the enormity of the decision we had made came thundering down on me, and as I stared at the empty boxes waiting to be packed full of the detritus of our lives, it all just seemed too much.

If this was a movie, it would be at this point that dramatic, motivational music would start pumping and a montage of Dan and I packing, cleaning, biffing out and donating a whole bunch of stuff would fill the screen. Then, after the requisite 90 seconds, it would cut to an uplifting, inspiring chorus showing us sitting in our van, parked up on the east coast of the South Island, watching the sun go down, thankful but all the better for having gone through that whole process.

Actually, I’m exhausted and all I want to do is nap for a week.

But the beautiful thing is that now I have time to rest. I have time to nap, recover, relax and do a whole lot of nothing. Was it hard? Yep. Was it stressful? Yep. But was it worth it? Oh my goodness, a thousand times yes.

From here on out, I’ll be posting about our adventures as we live full-time in our van until January 2021. My goals for this year are:
- to improve my Te Reo Maori,
- to learn more about this beautiful country by experiencing it,
- to engage and use my creativity in some way every day, and
- to read all the forgotten and forlorn books which have been sitting on my shelf awaiting my attention.

I hope you all have a fabulous Christmas and New Years! Thanks for reading.