Returning Home: Filling the Void

One of the main reasons for taking this trip was, of course, for this family of four to spend an extended amount of time together instead of living our daily, mostly separate lives. At home, like most of you and outside of vacations which usually are not longer than a week, we don’t spend much time each day all together as a family.  Even if one parent stays at home, you get maybe an hour in the morning and a couple at night when everyone is together?  Three hours a day?  And sometimes those three hours feel like too many!  In the morning, you want to leave for work or the kids to go to school so that you can have some peace.  At night, you want the kids to go to sleep so that you can have a little bit of time to be with your husband or wife or partner.

So, despite the fact that the very point of the trip was to spend time together, there was a moment in the desert of northern Chile, back on day 3 or 4 of the 89 with a volcano looming over me, when I had a bit of a panic about whether we actually could do it. Whether we had the ability to spend that much time together without everything falling apart.  Whether I had that ability.  It wasn’t severe panic – it was mostly a fleeting feeling – but I still felt ashamed.  It wasn’t a proud moment.

I think I had that moment at that time and I think we sometimes feel like three hours a day is too many because we fill ourselves up with so many other things – work, fitness/health, politics, social media, kids’ activities, consumption, volunteering, friends, gossip – that those three hours is about as much space as you have left. And that’s what you grow accustomed to. It’s not that you wouldn’t rather spend more time together as a family, it’s just that you’re terribly out of practice at it.  And being out of practice – because you never really do it – you wonder whether you can do it and whether you’ll actually like spending all day, every day with these people. And so, I panicked.

But it turns out – miraculously! – that when you do what we did, you empty yourself of the unimportant things that used to fill you up (some things – friends, fitness/health, volunteering – are undoubtedly important and good) and you fill yourself up with your family.

And then.  And then you remember more clearly why you fell in love 22 years ago.  And then you discover that your first baby boy now has a sense of humor you can relate to. And then you hold your youngest’s hand so tight every time he reaches out because you can almost feel it growing inside yours.  And then you are more full of precious things than you could have imagined.

And then you come home and you go back to work and your kids go back to school and what filled you up feels like it’s rushing out.  The void it leaves is hard to live with.  The first few days after we came back were the hardest and darkest of my life.  It’s still hard and will be for a long time.  

But I’m trying to be more discriminating in what I let fill in that void and to make sure the important things fill more of it.  Some things will be irreplaceable.  Cam and Wes have to go to school.  Wisconsin is not quite Patagonia or the Southern Alps of New Zealand.  We’ll make some changes, most will be small…some might be big.  

Most of all, I’m trying as much as possible to make those three hours a day feel like an 89-day adventure to the other side of the world.

The Welsh Brothers' Report: Episode 5...from Hobbiton!

Greetings!

We squeezed in a short, but special report from the Shire!  Yesterday, we did a tour of the movie set of Hobbiton, featured in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies.  Definitely a highlight of our trip and we'll post more photos separately.

Enjoy!

Week 11: Milford Sound, Mt. Cook, and Christchurch

Greetings!

It hasn’t been too long since our last post, but we’re on a four-hour ferry from the South Island to the North and it felt like a good time for blogging.  

When we left you, we were about to embark on an overnight cruise of Milford Sound.  Milford Sound is a smaller fjord than Doubtful Sound, its neighbor to the south, and I’ll let the pictures speak to its remarkable beauty. Our ship was a smaller version of the one you’ll see in the photos, which slept about 60 people whereas ours accommodated around 30.  The boys were excited to sleep on a boat and our cabin was a tiny space, large enough only to fit two sets of bunk beds.  Cam & Wes definitely have scenery fatigue, if not at least fjord fatigue after already cruising Doubtful Sound, and spent most of their time making their way through the ship’s extensive selection of board games while Aimee and I enjoyed our time above deck.

We lost cell service at around 3pm local time on Friday during our drive to Milford Sound and didn’t return to a coverage area until the next day around noon.  As a result, we spent Friday night on the ship having no idea what had occurred in Christchurch that afternoon, only learning of the terrorist attack when texts and news alerts started popping up on our phones Saturday morning.

We arrived in Christchurch on Monday evening, after spending one night on the southern coast and then another in Mt. Cook National Park, where we did some light hiking.  

Lake Pukaki

Aoraki/Mt. Cook

The Southern Alps from the Hooker Valey Track

The Southern Alps

As some of you may know, Christchurch, a city with about the same population as Milwaukee, already was in recovery mode from a one-two punch of earthquakes in September 2010 and February 2011.  The first was a stronger 7.1 magnitude quake, but centered farther from the city and 11 kilometers underground.  It also struck at 4:30am, while most of the city was still at home.  The second was a magnitude 6.3, but occurred right under the city, 5k deep, at just after noon.  Almost all of the downtown buildings were destroyed and many residential neighborhoods were deemed lost and not suitable for rebuilding.  Nearly 200 people died.  

As a result of the devastation in the city, residents and businesses had to relocate to surrounding areas and the center is just now starting to regain its heartbeat.  Almost all of the buildings – residential, commercial, and retail – are brand new and very modern, which evokes a fairly strange feeling when you know the city is over 175 years old.  There are a few tall buildings that survived the earthquake, along with many historical structures (churches, mostly) that suffered extensive damage but which the city is trying to preserve. The city’s cathedral still sits right in the center of town without a front façade.

As a result of the attack on Friday, the center of the city was even more quiet than usual on Monday, with many people attending an organized vigil.  Despite the frequency of mass shootings in the US, including white supremacist attacks, and other than the 2012 shooting at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, WI, we had never been so close to an attack like this.  In addition to horror at the loss of lives and disgust with the familiar theme of whites-of-European-descent murdering others out of hate, Aimee and I both felt a sense of shame and responsibility for the Christchurch attack.  Even though we know that white supremacy and associated violence is a worldwide problem, the way it is practiced and, apparently, condoned in the United States makes it feel like an American export.  It’s a much more serious version of the shame we feel when we see McDonald’s and KFC when we travel: is this really what we have to give to the world?

Like the US, New Zealand has fairly liberal gun laws, but they certainly do not have the same history of mass shootings.  And it seems that they, unlike us, intend to take steps to prevent things like this from happening again.  Jacinda Adern, the well-loved prime minister, has vowed to institute new gun-control laws within 10 days of the Christchurch attacks.

On a more positive Christchurch note, the city built a huge, child-designed playground in the central business district on the site of an earthquake-demolished building, which the boys loved.  Aimee and I took them there after we popped down to a coffee shop early in the morning for a coffee/breakfast date while the boys slept in.

Our last long drive of our month on the South Island took us from Christchurch back north to Marlborough where we caught the ferry to Wellington.  The drive, like all of the rest, was beautiful but perhaps notable because of the still-visible damage caused by another earthquake that struck 2 hours north of Christchurch in 2016.  The route mostly hugs the coast and the earthquake caused huge landslides on the adjacent mountains.  They’re still engaged in extensive repairs to the road and you can easily see huge scars on the mountains where the rocks and trees were shaken free.

We have one week left of this incredible adventure.  Our plan is to spend a couple days hitting some Lord of the Rings spots, including Hobbiton, on our way up to the Bay of Plenty where we reserved a house on a beach for our last few days in New Zealand.  

We are all looking forward to going home, but the emotion of ending this journey is definitely starting to hit me.  I hope I can find the words to express this feeling.

Talk to you soon.

Love,

Max, Aimee, Cam & Wes

Week 10: Wanaka/Queenstown and Fiordland National Park

Greetings!

We spent seven days in the Wanaka/Queenstown area and didn’t scratch the surface of all there was to do. We hiked and mountain biked, but missed some trails that definitely are worth returning for one day.  We paid to ride luge carts at the top of a mountain, go river boarding, and explore a kiwi wildlife park, but you could spend a fortune doing all of the paid adventure activities in the area, some of which seem wildly unsafe (river boarding on a narrow river gorge is one thing, jet boating on a river on a narrow river gorge is another entirely).

The view of Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown

Lake Wanaka

Awesome restaurant in beautiful Arrowtown

As I mentioned, we went to a kiwi wildlife park where we finally saw some kiwis.  I was beginning to think that maybe this kiwi bird was a trick that New Zealand plays on tourists.  Like, they all got together and decided that they’d play up the existence of this non-existent, ridiculous looking, flightless, nocturnal bird that nobody ever sees but you miiiight sometimes hear.  I suppose it could still be a trick, more elaborately played using animatronic replicas.  It was quite dark in the kiwi viewing area (“You see, if we tell them the kiwi is nocturnal and that we therefore have to keep it dark in the viewing area, they won’t be able to tell that the mechanical birds aren’t real!”).  

Real or not, the “kiwi” is much larger than any of us expected.  Also very large is the size of the one egg that the female carries and then lays: it’s one third of the bird’s body size and weight.  They showed us an x-ray of a “kiwi” just before the egg was laid and sweet jesus was it terrifying.

The “kiwi” is endangered because a couple dummies brought over some possums from Australia to start a fur trade, not realizing that there are no possum predators on New Zealand.  As a result, the possum numbers started at two and ended up at 80 million, while the “kiwi” numbers went in the opposite direction.  There’s an impressive nationwide effort to completely eradicate all birdlife predators (the stoat and the feral cat being the primary other also-imported targets) by 2040.  They’ve reduced possum numbers by half since the eradication efforts began.

We’d show you photos of the “kiwi,” but – you guessed it – no photos allowed.  Suspect.

Cam and Aimee went river boarding (Wes is too young) and had an absolute blast.  Cam had a smile on his face the entire time and came out of the river saying that he felt rejuvenated.  I’m not sure when or how he got un-juvenated, but we’re glad that he’s juvenated again. I suppose a splash (or many splashes) of glacial cold river water in your face can make a pre-teen feel a bit better after spending days on end with his parents and little brother (and only his parents and little brother).

Our hikes have continued to be incredible, both in terms of the scenery and the boys’ ability/willingness to complete them with us.  As I think we’ve mentioned, getting them – particularly Wesley – to the top does require a mix of imagination, cajoling, and outright lying (“I think the top is right up here…just a little more”).  But it has taken less and less as we’ve done more hiking.  On our last hike in Wanaka to view the Rob Roy Glacier, he ran up the 5k trail, passing group after group of hikers.  We couldn’t keep up and he was waiting for us at the top.

Rob Roy Glacier

When he walks with us, Wesley never stops talking.  We’ve fallen into a pattern of me hiking up the trails with Wes and Aimee hiking back down with him.  He holds our hand most of the time and jabbers away, mostly about things like movies and video games but also about the beginning of the universe, the tallest or biggest things in the world, when Aimee and I decided to get married, and how babies get made.  Wes has provided some of the highlights and lowlights of this trip.  He's had a few tantrums and antagonizes the bejeezus out of his brother.  On the other hand, he says the funniest stuff, often injecting hilarity at just the right moment when Aimee and I are stressed about some thing or another.  On one occasion when I was either losing my patience with him hanging me during a hike or with Cam getting lost in his own head (I can't remember the context), Wes chimed in with, "Well, if you didn't want to have to deal with stuff like that, you shouldn't have become a daddy."  Aimee and I laughed so hard and now it's become a meme (no, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly) on this trip that we all use at times of stress.

We fudge the birds and bees thing with Wes, but we have taken the opportunity of this trip to talk a bit more about it with Cam.  We realized before we left when we asked him about how he thought it worked and he got the…um…insertion point…very incorrect that we needed to talk a bit more about the whole thing.  We’ve covered the anatomy of it, but also a bit of the science, along with more extensive discussions about appropriate male sexual behavior.  I'd say that he's not really enjoying it.

We left Wanaka/Queenstown on Tuesday and have been staying in a weird little campground in Manapouri for the last three nights.  Manapouri is in the Fiordlands (that’s how they spell it, with an “i” not a “j”) area of New Zealand, just outside the vast Fiordland National Park.  We did a wilderness day-cruise of Doubtful Sound – which we learned is a fjord, not a sound – and are headed off tonight for an overnight cruise of Milford Sound (also a fjord).  Fjords, you see, are water-filled valleys carved by glaciers; sounds are just sea or ocean inlets.

 

We did our longest hike of the trip so far on a portion of the Kepler Track, a 60k loop in the mountains above Lake Manapouri and Lake Te Anau.  The Kepler Track is one of New Zealand’s 10 “Great Walks,” long, multi-day hiking trails with huts where you can bunk and cook spaced along the trail. We hiked 10k in to the first hut on the Kepler Track, where we had lunch before returning back down the mountain. New Zealand raised the cost of staying in the huts last year because they realized they were losing a ton of money financing the hiking journeys of tourists.  The price of a night in the first hut on the Kepler Track, the Luxmore Hut, was raised from $12/night to $130/night for non-New Zealanders.  So, for a family of four to stay for one night, it would cost $520 (about $300-$350 in US dollars).  For that price you get bunks, a potty, and a sheltered place to cook your food – and that’s it.  Seems like there’s a bit of a deterrent factored into that price.  We passed on the night in the hut.

The southwest of NZ is incredibly beautiful.  The entire place seems like (and, in fact, was) the setting for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies.  We’ve found our way to a few of the actual filming sites (we’ll do more of that when we return to the North Island next week, including a visit to Hobbiton) and sat last night in a booth in a restaurant that was once inhabited by Elijah Wood, Orlando Bloom, Ian McKellen, Billy Boyd, Jonathan Rhys-Davies, and a host (pod?  gaggle?  murder?) of other dwarves.

After our overnight cruise, we begin our return trip to the north of the South Island, where we’ll catch a ferry across the Cook Straight to the North Island, where we’ll have six nights before our flight home.  Stops in Dunedin and Christchurch remain on our South Island trip, and we’ll report on those in our next blog post.

We hope that warmer weather has started to return to the Northern Hemisphere and that signs of Spring are beginning to arrive.  It’s definitely turning toward Fall here.

We love and miss you all. Talk again soon.

Max, Aimee, Cam & Wes

Week 9: The West Coast

Greetings!

When we last wrote, we technically already had started the West Coast (South Island) portion of our travels up in Golden Bay and Farewell Spit.  From there, we drove through the mountains on the southern end of Kahurangi National Park to Westport, a small town about 150 kilometers further south along the coast.

Westport is an ok town; we were staying in that area solely in order to visit the Oparara Basin, which contains a series of limestone arches and caves carved by Oparara River.  The series of arches were pretty impressive.  You had to climb down through a small cave in order to get to one.  The other was enormous, with the top of the (mostly limestone) arch passing hundreds of feet overhead.

There also was a network of caves, featuring spiders, glowworms, and interesting tile formations in the hardened soil of the mud floor.  Aimee and the boys learned that I do not enjoy the confined spaces of caves and got a kick out of my near-panic level of anxiety, which ultimately sent me scurrying back out the opening each time things got a little too dark and a little too there's-only-one-way-out-of-here-and-something's-going-to-happen-and-we're-all-going-to-be-trapped-and-die.

We stayed at a lodge on the beach outside of Westport.  The lodge was nice and the beach setting beautiful, but the owner of the lodge was a bit off and ultimately it's the first bad-lodging experience that we've had on this long trip.  I suppose that like getting out of Chile without at least one flat tire, we couldn't expect to have a flawless experience with all of the AirBnBs, hotels, hostels, and campgrounds in almost 3 months.

From Westport, we drove south along Route 6, the PCH of the South Island, and then inland a bit into Arthur's Pass National Park.  APNP was the South Island's first national park, officially formed in 1929.  We stayed one night in a beautiful campground in the mountains and did a short day-hike near a ski field.

APNP is where we first started to encounter the South Island's famed sand flies, which we luckily didn't have any of up in Golden Bay.  The sand flies are tiny, but they feast in swarms on any exposed skin.  Bug repellent works only very temporarily.  As you travel south, you increasingly can actually see the evidence the carnage that sand flies have wreaked on the legs of travelers.

Our night in APNP gave us an amazing view of the stars, which Aimee was able to capture magnificently on her fancy camera, but it also gave us frigid temperatures.  Aimee, Cam, and I shivered through a sleepless night, while Wesley "Hot Box" Welsh slumbered warmly and peacefully.  As a result, we found a campground further south along the coast with little cottages made from insulated shipping containers.

Mt. Cook (right) and Mt. Tasman from the beach at sunset

Dinner at our shipping container campsite

Our next night - our last before arriving in Wanaka - was another campground on another beautiful beach.  We have continued our North Island beach experience on the South Island, spending more time on beaches than in the mountains, which is not what we expected.  What we didn't realize is that the Southern Alps, which run the length of the South Island, are mostly accessible only from the eastern side of the range, not the West Coast.  That is, unless you have a helicopter.

We decided to splurge for a helicopter tour over the glaciers of the Souther Alps.  There are dozens of glaciers, large and small; the largest/longest is the Tasman Glacier, followed by the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers.  The Tasman flows off the eastern slopes of Mt. Tasman and Mt. Cook (Maori name: Aoraki), New Zealand's two tallest mountains.  Our trip included a landing on one of the smaller glaciers.  We had perfect weather and it was the first time the boys and I had ever been in a helicopter; Aimee had done a Niagara Falls flight when she was a kid.  It was very expensive, but worth every penny.  Flying mere meters over mountaintops and floating above the crevasses in the glacial ice is something we'll never forget.

Mt. Cook

The Tasman Glacier

The boys playing on a glacier at the top of a mountain

Quick, funny story.  If you've been reading this blog, you'll remember that I mentioned the confounding compulsion that Aimee has which requires her to disappear in airports precisely at the time that our plane begins to board.  It's a compulsion that I've become somewhat accustomed to; it remains frustrating, but it's no longer surprising.  I was, however, completely unprepared for it to manifest itself in the helicopter-boarding setting.

They had to bring in a larger, six-person helicopter to take the four of us and two other people on our tour, which meant we were all standing around for about ten minutes waiting for it to arrive.  And then you could hear it before you could see it coming around the mountain.  We all watched it approach, excitedly.

When it was about 100 feet from the landing area, Aimee turned to me and said, "I have to go to the bathroom," and trotted off.  I was...completely speechless.  It's one thing for the disappearance compulsion to strike when there are one hundred other people who also have to board the flight, which is going to take 30 minutes; it's another thing entirely when there are five, the rotors are spinning, and the pilot is holding the door for you.  We all boarded and then watched from inside a helicopter for Aimee to come running back from the bathroom.

We're in Wanaka now, staying in an AirBnB for a week.  Wanaka is a tourist- and adventure-focused town toward the southwest of the South Island.  Both Wanaka and its larger neighbor, Queenstown, are set on the shores of large, beautiful lakes surrounded by huge mountains, including a range called The Remarkables, which is my new favorite mountain range name.  It's hard to come up with a comparable place in the U.S.  Tahoe, but without a gaudy casino?  Burlington, but with much bigger mountains?  Anyway, it's breathtakingly beautiful.

We did a long, 16 kilometer (1,300 meter elevation gain) hike up Isthmus Peak on our first day here.  It was steep and seemingly never-ending, but once again the boys accomplished the whole thing.  Getting them to the top does take quite a combination of distraction, pleading, bribery, and outright lying (e.g., "this is the last switchback before the top, I promise), but I don't think that diminishes the accomplishment.  What's diminishing is how hobbled Aimee and I are by these hikes the next morning.

We'll report on the remainder of our time in Wanaka next week, when we move to our most-southern destination, the South Island's Fjordlands.

Talk to you soon!

Max, Aimee, Cam & Wes