Rangitoto Island for Valentine’s day

Well, even in the apocalypse Stefan and I can’t seem to keep up with timely posts on our blog. We’re almost two months behind on our posts, so we’re throwing out a short one today! More to come on that, but first a quick update on our living situation: New Zealand, like most of the world, is currently on lockdown. They’ve handled the whole situation really well in our opinion–they announced the lockdown around four weeks ago with only about 100 confirmed cases, and as of the time of writing there’s only been 1 coronavirus-related death in the whole country. 

We’re also incredibly lucky that we were finishing up a HelpX right when the lockdown got announced, and our current host (more to come on him in a future post!) very generously offered to let us stay for the 4-week period. We’re still able to work outside and have an incredible, isolated beach just about a two minute walk away, so we’re doing just fine. 

We’ll give more details on that situation soon, but for the time being, let’s take a trip back in time to when the world hadn’t yet ground to a screeching halt. Ah yes, the good ol’ days, when Trump was predicting that the coronavirus would be gone by April, and the monsters were all enjoying each other’s company, dancing, holding their evil in check…let’s go back to Valentine’s Day! 

Stefan’s birthday happened to fall on the day we moved out of our stellar third HelpX (which you can read more about here), so we got a lot more vacuuming done than celebrating, but that was all saved for the next day! 

We spent the day traveling to our hostel in Auckland, where we waited for my cousin to pick us up to go to one of Auckland’s finest food courts: Elliott Stables.

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXRS__VZBgo&w=854&h=480]

On Valentine’s Day the next day, we woke up to hike Rangitoto, a volcanic island and wildlife preserve just off the coast of the Auckland CBD. Rather than let this post extend as long as our last one, we’ll let our videos do the talking for us. Now, we hesitated to post these videos at all, as we can’t say they have the same entertainment value as some of our other videos (no freestyle raps or chicken attacks in this one). But since the main purpose of this blog is to keep our friends and families informed, we thought we’d go ahead and put it out there just to let you know what we’ve been up to, even if it isn’t great cinema.

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EU_Nsw0SSE&w=854&h=480]

In the end, Rangitoto made for a fun day hike, but we probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone due to the cost of the ferry ride to get over to the island. For our purposes, however, it was a nice way to stretch our legs before getting on the plane.

Getting on the plane?! That’s right! After completing our Rangitoto trip and grabbing a delicious seafood lunch, we had a plane to catch! Before heading to the airport, I tried sprinting around 10 blocks  with some additional winter clothes we wanted to leave with my cousin–even though we had ditched one suitcase at Jim and Melanie’s, we were still regretting lugging around a suitcase and a duffle bag. 

Unfortunately, all I was able to leave with my cousin was a puddle of sweat after my long run. Even though I knew my cousin was at work, I had thought I could leave a bag with his apartment manager to hand over in a couple hours. Keeping up the generous reputation of landlords everywhere, he coldly informed me he wasn’t running a delivery service and sent me on my way. So I ran back across town again to where I had left Stefan re-organizing our remaining bags. 

Although we had a bit of a panic on whether our bus would make it to the airport in time during rush hour, we managed to get safely on the plane, the only downside being that we both probably smelled awful to our fellow passengers after our hot hike and my track & field audition. But we were on our way to our next destination! Where was that? You’ll have to tune in to our next blog post to find out!