New Zealand: Living in a Postcard!

After five weeks here it’s become easy to feel at home in New Zealand. Everywhere we go we encounter beautiful landscapes, friendly people, clean and usually picturesque towns and cities, well-preserved historic homes and public buildings of the style we love most (Victorian and Edwardian), excellent local food and produce, and an un-crowded, un-hurried pace of life. Jan says she feels like she is always IN a postcard!

Jan attended the New Zealand Lactation Consultants annual conference in Auckland and offered an all-day HUG Your Baby workshop that was exceptionally well received. She also met with Plunket nurses and educators in Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland, and spoke at a nursing school in Nelson, where I had the pleasure of going on a country “tramp” with David Mitchell, an experienced nurse educator who has done some excellent research on working with fathers.

Our “needs priorities” in terms of accommodation have gotten clearer to us as we travel. We need a “cooker and frig,” as we mostly cook for ourselves. Because we seldom rent a car, a decent grocery store must be walking distance from our place. We need a good Internet connection, something easier said than accomplished in many of the places we have stayed before we got to New Zealand. We’ve also found that we need two separate rooms, so that one of us doesn’t wake up the other when arising in the middle of the night to work or read. We like to have a bathroom with a tub, as Jan likes to soak. It’s a real plus when the place we stay has a gym for me.

We prefer to stay put for at least a week at a time, place our clothes into drawers and closets, and pack away our suitcases. For people who have devoted so much time, through the years, to homemaking, it takes surprisingly little to satisfy our sense of "home" on this trip. We spend a full day, at least five days a week, keeping up with HUG Your Baby projects and correspondence, as well as managing our travel plans and expenses. Jim always goes out for walks and exercise, but some days Jan never goes out at all because there is so much HUG business to manage. She can lose track of time, immersed in the work she loves.

We enjoyed visiting Friends Meetings in New Zealand. For a week we stayed in the Wellington Friends Centre’s fellowship hall, with a piano and full kitchen. We didn’t (much) mind putting away our beds (from their place on the floor) when gatherings were planned. We also attended Meeting in Nelson and in Auckland. In Nelson we were delighted to meet Joe and Beth Volk, who used to live in Durham when Joe had his office, as a field worker for the AFSC, in the Meeting House. Small world! Beth and Joe are traveling like us—but their retirement travels are planned to last TWO years! You can follow their blog. We were not able to make it to the Friends Settlement at Whanganui. But visiting that former Friends School will give us something to do when we come back again, one day. Hopefully by then the Friends Meeting in Christchurch will have risen from the rubble of the 2011 earthquake and the muck of this week’s flood.

As we travel I've been reading quite a bit. Most of my choices are travel-related. In New Zealand I read both of Eleanor Catton’s novels. She is awesome! The Rehearsal is a contemporary study of girls in high school, saxophone music and theater arts, and betrayals of trust. The Luminaries recently won the Man Booker Prize and is a big and beautifully constructed novel set in the days of the New Zealand gold rush. It's written in a glorious nineteenth-century style. As we leave, he’s finishing up James Belich’s fascinating, scholarly study, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century.

Jim has also enjoyed researching and writing the music for the HUG lullabies we are writing together. Tony Bowman is producing and recording them in North Carolina. We’ve learned as much as we could about Maori childbirth practices to include in our NZ lullaby. New Zealand has some great museums and collections to draw upon. We especially enjoyed Te Papa in Wellington, and the War Memorial Museum and city Art Gallery in Auckland.

Today we reach a natural “half time” break in our travels. Our next stop on the HUG Your Baby “international teaching tour” is the UK in April. Today, on Jonathan’s birthday, we fly from Auckland to San Francisco. It is about as cheap to go from NZ to UK via North America as via Dubai. So we will see sister Nancy and her family in California. (It will be a LONG day! Because of the mysteries of the International Date Line, we arrive in SFO BEFORE we leave AUK!)

We had to miss Nancy and KB’s wedding at the end of last year because of our travels, and now we can celebrate properly with them! After California Jan will fly to Durham to pick up her mom and bring her London, while Jim will spend a week with Dave in Chicago before flying to Heathrow.

This blog will resume in Europe. HUG Your Baby presentations are planned for April and May at conferences in Portsmouth, England; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Bologna, Italy. We will see Nancy and Kathryn, and Dave Smith and Susan Strozier, in England, before returning to Durham July 28, 2014.