Mā te wā

We did it!! Just a little over 2 years (and 1 month :/) after parting ways in New Zealand, we’ve finally caught up on our blog publishing. It was right at the end of July 2020 that we returned to Auckland from our final adventure in Northland. The last days before Stefan’s flight were spent finalizing his itinerary once he was back in the US: having left his car with Dagmar’s parents in Cincinnati, he had a 3-day road trip to get to his aunt’s house in Denver. That planning was substantially complicated by the reality of having to actually deal with COVID after so many months of avoiding it, necessitating more forethought than usual for contactless food and lodging.

But fear of the pandemic we hadn’t truly had to deal with yet wasn’t the only thing making the trip back hard. Although Stefan had reluctantly decided to cut his trip short for a new job at the University of Denver, we had agreed that Dagmar would keep enjoying her 1-time New Zealand visa for as long as possible. Separating for long distance was something we had unfortunately had lots of practice hating, but this time was particularly difficult for Stefan. Leaving Dagmar and the stunning landscapes of New Zealand behind to go back to academia–something Stefan had very seriously considered ruling out after disillusionment with grad school and an unsuccessful post-graduation job search–in a politically unstable country where he was exposing himself to a potentially deadly disease all made him very sincerely question whether he was making the right choice. The closer the flight date came, the less sure he was of this, and the day before leaving he came very close to calling it all off.

Fortunately, however, Dagmar was there to support him and get him through it. As much as she hated long distance herself, she knew this was the right choice for his career and gave him the encouragement he needed to go through with it. Although the specter of things ending hung over our last days together, we took as many walks as we could around Auckland, with Stefan trying as hard as he could to commit the beautiful scenery and unique birdsongs to memory. until the next time he’ll be able to come back While he couldn’t bring those with him, he still puts them on in the background whenever he’s working!

So while finally getting on the plane felt like closing one of the most exciting chapters of Stefan’s life, catching up on this blog–however slow it’s been–has helped us keep that chapter going. As you might have noticed, the purpose of our blog has slowly evolved since our first post back in November 2019: it started as a way to keep our family and friends informed about what we’d been up to and we at one point considered whether we could include some non-personal content like travel and budgeting advice to turn it into a side hustle (we even briefly had an Amazon affiliate link!). When COVID and the ticking clock of Stefan’s job made things a bit more chaotic, our writing slowed down and eventually the blog became less for others and more for us to look back on as a journal in future years. This has been especially apparent digging back through photos for this post: particularly for the first several months, we were much more willing to leave footage/photos unpublished if it made for a better product, whereas our posts since we left New Zealand have crammed in everything possible, reader experience be damned!

With this post, we finally have that journal complete! And just in time for another chapter in our life to start: 2 years after Stefan’s proposal (and Dagmar’s counter-proposal), neither of us has called the other’s bluff and it looks like this game of chicken is going to end in about a week with a bonafide marriage! We still regularly talk about New Zealand and both have absolutely no regrets about taking advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity rather than staying with the safe, easy option in the US.

We both feel this trip helped solidify our relationship into one that will last a lifetime. It’s easy to discount that, with it having been something of a 7 month-long honeymoon, but we went through a lot together: Dagmar quit a high-paying job to paint walls and clean chicken poop, we dug a cow out of a hole (not to mention our own car), survived a pandemic which split many couples apart despite spending that time sleeping in a tent inside a freezing, mouse-infested house, planned and budgeted amazing adventures through patches of virtual unemployment, tolerated each other even when we went weeks without a shower and months without a haircut, and always found joy with one another whether our eyes were soaking in world-famous landscapes or our butts were soaking into a comfy couch on a rainy day. If our pipe dream of competing on The Amazing Race ever comes true, we may not be the winning team, but we’re the perfect team for one another!

Even if it meant pestering you readers in the process, we are also incredibly happy that we documented our trip so thoroughly and we will look back fondly on all of these memories. With luck, these will be the first of many. We both really loved the experience of living abroad and are eager to get the opportunity again. This may not be in the immediate future, at least not for the long term, since we’re both also looking for ways to spend more time with our families here in the US. But as a possibility in the short term, Dagmar already works remotely and Stefan is hoping to convince his university to let him start doing so for one quarter out of the year, so even a 30-90 day stay may come sooner than we think!

But we won’t wait until then to keep writing on this blog. In fact, we have lots of ideas to share–but before that, a little bit more about our final thoughts on New Zealand. The night before Stefan left, we sat down to extemporize on our favorite and least favorite parts of the trip. The recording ended up extremely long, and with it already being late in the evening, we abruptly quit filming rather than giving it the hours more it would have deserved. We’ll post what we have below–it may be a bit slow, but we tried to liven it up with some photos, and ultimately, as we said above, this blog is more to collect our memories in one place than to prioritize good presentation, so if you get bored, skip it! For those who stick around to the end, we also edited in a video of us re-opening suitcases of un-necessities our hosts at HelpX #3 had been kind enough to store for us–boy did we overpack!

While we originally envisioned our final video as having a bit more pomp and circumstance, complete with tear-inducing music swelling over wistful montages of our favorite moments, we’re frankly scrambling to finish this before our wedding so that’s not gonna happen! Second, and more importantly, this isn’t necessarily the end of the blog; while we’re going to take an extended hiatus (planned, this time!), there are plenty of topics we are likely to come back and write about:

• There is a fair amount of footage/photos from the early days of our trip which is either saved on a hard drive or hiding on one of Dagmar’s Instagrams
• Dagmar may decide she wants to catalogue her final 3 months alone in New Zealand; time which she spent revisiting our amazing HelpX #3 hosts, making friends, and exploring more of the North Island.
• We may write about other trips we take, like our recent trip to Puerto Rico or our hopeful honeymoon plans for 2023!
• We may even decide to write about travel-adjacent topics, like budgeting or language learning

Until then, however, thank you so much for reading. We know that those of you who do are close friends and family, and while we have regularly talked on this blog about how much New Zealand means to us and how much we mean to each other, your support has been so crucial. THANK YOU for encouraging us to follow our dreams, for listening to us blather on about our experiences, and for showing interest all the way! So while it’s likely we’ll talk to you in person before the next blog post, it isn’t Goodbye forever from Aki Aora Travel–just a simple “See you later.” Or, as they say in the Maori we never got around to learning, “Mā te wā!”

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