New Zealand: December 2019 - The First Christmas

I could not stay home.

That was not a feeling — it was a fact, the way some things become facts when you stop arguing with them. My husband had died eleven months before and Christmas was coming and I could not sit in San Diego and do that. Not the first one. Not with the routines and the shape of everything exactly where it used to be.

I had also started thinking about leaving. Not the trip — leaving leaving. Moving. Starting over somewhere that didn't know me as the person this had happened to. New Zealand had come up more than once in those conversations with myself, the way places do when you're looking at your life like a problem that might need a different answer.

So I booked three weeks and I was deliberate about the timing. The dead week between Christmas and New Year's is the week nobody at work needs anything from you. I was a Technical Program Manager. I understood calendars. Three weeks with that window in the middle meant I was only burning real PTO at the edges, I'd be back before peak season hit, and January 4th, the one-year mark, fell squarely inside it. Nobody was going to say no to me being gone that day. I wasn't going to be here for it.

I didn't ask. I told. Nothing exploded. It was fine.

This became my norm — extend the Christmas holiday, come home before things got crazy, never feel bad about it. The calendar window was always there. I just had to decide to use it.

Air New Zealand flies direct from Los Angeles to Auckland. They have a product called the Skycouch — a row of three economy seats where the footrests fold all the way up to create a flat surface the length of the row. I ran every combination before booking: my son as a lap infant with the Skycouch add-on, him as a paid seat with the Skycouch add-on, both options priced out. I booked whatever came out cheapest. We got the whole row, it folded flat, we both fit, we both slept. Fourteen hours handled.

New Zealand is essentially a day ahead. There is no jet lag to speak of flying west — your body has been asleep the whole way and it doesn't notice. I did not stay up watching the flight map. I slept.

We landed Christmas Eve. I picked up a rental car and learned to drive on the left side of the road. The roads were empty, which was lucky, because I needed a few miles to convince my hands and my instincts that this was fine. We drove to the Coromandel Peninsula and everything there was closed for Christmas. The whole town. We found a kebab shop open, ate there, and went to sleep.

Coromandel

The Coromandel is where you go when you want New Zealand before it knows you're looking. We based there for almost a week and moved around the peninsula by day.

Hot Water Beach. Thermal springs push through the sand at low tide and you dig a pool. The water was too hot for either of us so he ran through the cold ones and threw mud for an hour. He had a full breakdown when we had to leave. I took it as a sign the trip was going well.

New Chums Beach. You hike in and wade through a tidal outlet to get there. I watched the tide, picked my moment, took off my boots, put him on my hip, and we crossed. The beach on the other side was empty except for three people we'd passed on the path. He collected sticks. We stayed until he was ready to go.

Driving Creek Railway. A narrow-gauge train through native bush up to a viewpoint. We went on the afternoon that turned out to be too close to bedtime. He screamed the entire way down. The other passengers were gracious or very good at looking like they were.

Every morning we went to the same bakery. He chased birds on the street while I woke up and breathed. This became the rhythm of the whole trip.

Matamata and Lake Taupo

We drove south through Matamata, which is Hobbiton country. The tour tickets had been sold out for weeks. We stopped in town anyway, walked the streets, grabbed a few toy trucks and a ball, took pictures with a hobbit house. He ran up and down the sidewalk with the trucks. It was enough.

Lake Taupo is enormous — large enough to feel like an inland sea. We stayed two nights on the water. He discovered the spa tub jets and said "bubble" approximately four hundred times. I sat on the balcony after he went down and watched the lake go dark.

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves were on December 30th. The tour ends with a boat ride through a cave in complete silence and complete darkness — the ceiling is covered in larvae that produce light as a byproduct of their biology, thousands of them, the whole cave glowing blue-green above you. He was sixteen months old and he was quiet for almost the entire thing. He said wow twice. I decided not to count it.

Wellington and New Year's Eve

We drove to Wellington on December 31st, stopping along the way for views of the volcanoes in Tongariro National Park. In Wellington we walked the harbor, went to Te Papa museum, watched helicopters land, played at a park. That evening I put him down, went to the hotel bar, ate dinner alone, and discovered Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc, which I have thought about regularly since. The new year arrived. It was both fine and not fine simultaneously and the only thing to do was sit in it.

The Ferry and the South Island

We drove onto the Interislander car ferry on January 1st. You drive your car into a boat. My son was asleep when we rolled on and woke up confused in a way I found very relatable. He spent most of the three-hour crossing going up and down the stairs, then watched a magician in the lounge and pet his rabbit. The Marlborough Sounds came into view as we entered the channel and I stood on the deck with him and we looked at it together.

Abel Tasman

We stayed in a private rental near Kaiteriteri — a woman who did not normally accept children made an exception for us. There was a washer, a proper kitchen, room to actually live for a few days rather than just sleep. I had packed his life vest specifically for Abel Tasman. We got on a catamaran at Kaiteriteri on a last-minute booking and sailed to Anchorage Bay. He was nervous when the boat rocked at the start and had settled into full confidence within twenty minutes, at which point the problem was keeping him from going overboard. The bay was turquoise in a way that looks edited. On the beach we found a German couple with an eight-month-old in the same small patch of shade and I watched them with their little one and thought about how good it was that they were doing this now, in that first year, while it was still so simple.

Marlborough

The Marlborough wine region is the reason to go to the South Island if you need a reason besides everything else. Cloudy Bay first — beautiful, crowded, exactly what a famous vineyard looks like. Hans Herzog was a disaster, no room for him to move, we left. Rock Ferry was right: he ran through the fruit trees while I sat on the deck in the sun and did a tasting. I bought three bottles to bring home. More on that in a moment.

The Drive South

I had bought a hiking backpack for this trip instead of a stroller. The South Island rewards that decision. We drove down the west coast over two days, stopping for a seal colony on the rocks, the Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki where the limestone formations stack into columns at the water's edge, and Hokitika Gorge — a short hike to a river that is a color of blue that looks made up. He rode in the pack on my back and was happy up there, the way he was happy anywhere he could see from above.

Franz Josef

The first day in Franz Josef it rained. We went to the hot springs in town and he swam. Strangers watched and were impressed, which I accepted on his behalf. He had been in the water since before he could walk.

The second morning the skies cleared.

We took a helicopter onto the glacier.

You take off from a gravel pad and within minutes you are over a river of ancient ice flowing down from peaks you cannot see the top of. Then you land on it. You get out and stand on it. My son walked on a glacier at sixteen months old and picked up a piece of ice with both hands and looked at it. I have a photo of his face in that moment. It was the first year. We had made it through the first year.

We drove south from Franz Josef and stopped at a small coastal pull-off. I wrote on a rock there for my husband. It felt necessary. We got back in the car.

Wanaka

We stayed in a yurt outside Wanaka. The owners had a child exactly his age and they played together while I cooked eggs in the morning and sat on the deck and felt, for the first time on the whole trip, genuinely still.

Queenstown was forty-five minutes away and it was a lot — the kind of place that is very good at being a destination and very loud about it. We were glad to be in Wanaka.

We hiked Mount Iron and went to the lavender farm where he fed goats and had his first taste of ice cream, honeycomb and cookies and cream shoved into his face until he understood what was happening. The Wanaka tree grows out of the lake. He jumped in next to it with his clothes on.

Arrowtown and the Kawarau Bridge

We drove to Arrowtown, walked the main street, found a good cafe with a grass area and toy trucks outside. Then I rented a bike with a child seat on the handlebars between my legs and rode out to a cheesery and vineyard through the Gibbston Valley. The hills were significant. The seat between my legs made pushing uphill a specific kind of hard. I walked most of the hills without shame. We crossed the Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge — the original commercial bungee site, a hundred and forty feet above the river — and I looked at the people dropping off it and wondered if that was something I would ever do. We made it to the vineyard. I ordered the cheese plate. I turned around for sixty seconds and birds ate the entire cheese plate. I called for a ride back.

Milford Sound

We splurged on a chalet at Milford Sound and stayed the night. There is no other way to experience it — the day trippers arrive and leave and then it is quiet and the scale of the place settles around you. It was drizzly. I sat at the window and watched the rain run down the mountain walls in sheets.

In the morning before we left my son had his first sips of a chai latte at the lodge breakfast. He was obsessed from the first taste.

Queenstown

We drove to Queenstown for the last two nights. The hotel check-in was a nightmare. We got Indian takeout and went to bed. The next morning I drove us out to Glenorchy and almost ran out of gas on the most beautiful road I have ever been on. Back in Queenstown we walked the harbor gardens. He chased the ducks, then the ducklings, chased the ducklings so persistently that the mother duck turned around and bit him. He cried in my arms. Then he went back for more chasing.

Home

We flew Queenstown to Auckland first. Someone in the window seat closed the shade on takeoff and we both watched it happen, both quietly sad — the Southern Alps were out there somewhere and we didn't get to see them. He screamed for most of that leg.

At the Auckland airport a man offered to help me with the bags during the connection. I said yes. I had learned early in solo travel with a baby to say yes when someone offers to help — not to perform competence, not to prove anything, just to say yes and let someone carry a bag. I still haven't figured that out at home. On the road I have it.

The long flight home he slept.

One of the three bottles of Rock Ferry wine did not make it. I discovered this when my suitcase came down the baggage carousel in San Diego trailing the very specific smell of a broken white wine bottle. Nothing quite like arriving home with a toddler and a suitcase that smells like a bar floor. Wrap each bottle individually so they can't knock against each other. Luckily it was white.

Somewhere over the Pacific on the long leg home I understood that I wasn't moving.

Not because New Zealand wasn't everything I thought it might be. It was. But the thing I was carrying had come with me on the plane, sat next to me at every dinner, hiked in the backpack and slept in the yurt. It would come with me anywhere. I could carry it in San Diego. As lonely as San Diego felt, it was still home.