New Zealand!

After so many months of planning and re-planning (more on this later). Our trip to New Zealand is almost here! The last time the world cup came around it was 2007, it was just the two of us (Connor was not even a glint in our eyes), I was in the middle of my postdoc, Ali was contemplating a return to school, and we had just received some terrible news. I spent a lot of my post MS diagnosis pity party at our local Scottish pub watching countless games of the Rugby World Cup. The unspoken reality was neither one of us knew what the next four years were going to be for us.

So we made a pact that regardless, next time around we were going to go to the World Cup, especially since it was held in New Zealand! We loved our last visit there, but were robbed of two weeks of our time there, as we left early to get back to the states for my interview with Sandia. That turned out to be a good move, but we knew that we wanted our missing two weeks back!

So we applied for our game tickets way back in May of 2010. We then recruited my parents, my brother and his wife, and our good friends from Australia to join us on our trip. We scored a pool pack with tickets to the Christchurch matches in September. We then hurriedly planned the whole thing, booking lodging, plane tickets, and campervan rentals.

Then the Christchurch earthquake hit in March which devastated the town. We spent month in limbo, and after they reassigned the matches had to repeat the planning process. Since we wanted to stay on the south island and wanted to minimize our travel while there, we opted to spend a week and a half in Dunedin on the very south of the island. We got our lodging and flights lined up. All that was left was the waiting!