So, I guess I never hit publish on the final write up from our NZ trip!

Wow, what a Trip!! Steve and Josh did an amazing job creating The Plan, and we mostly stuck to it, good job guys!

I like to do a wrap up after a trip to remind myself of what I’d do/pack differently and also to give people reading this tips!

Lodging:
*Traveling with a group of 4 is perfect! This allowed us to upgrade to private rooms in the hostels and then to afford to stay in the lodges when hostels weren’t available.
*City hostels mostly suck, The Atlantis being the outlier.
*Camper vans seem super popular but if you are driving one of those, do the right thing and pull over to let faster traffic go by!
*Camping would be an option in most areas

Cars and Driving:
Europcar was reasonable to deal with but still a pain. We were told we couldn’t take our rental car on the ferry to the South Island so we had to turn it in, get a new car for the south, turn that one back in, and get one final car for the last days up north. One guy told us that if we had told the first place we were bringing the car back to the north, they might have let us keep one car the whole time. Honestly though, getting a new, clean car every 5 days or so wasn’t a bad thing!
We are 3 for 3 in chipping windshields! Literally 2 hrs after picking up the final car, bam, rock chip! Chip and seal repairs are the norm in New Zealand and at least 2 of our chips came from the cars in the other approaching lane. So basically plan on chipping a windscreen or two (or three)!
Left hand driving is fine, just repeat after Josh “Tight Left, Wide Right” whenever you go to make a turn!
New Zealand roads are super windy but not as narrow as Ireland roads. The roads in the South Island are more narrow, more windy, and slower (at least realistically) than the roads in the North. Just because it says you can do 100 khr doesn’t mean you should!

Food:
Plan to spend about 18 – 28 NZ dollars for a sit down meal. The BP gas stations have a nice case of muffins and savory pies for quick grab and go meals.
Coffee Cafes are everywhere, until about 3 pm it seems. If you are planning a late night drive, you should plan your caffeine appropriately!
Local beer is good, between Steve, Josh, and myself we tried several and liked them all! The Horse and Jockey as probably our favorite pub but I can’t remember the beer there.
Pak-n-Save grocery stores are the bomb! They are sort of like an Aldi’s but much bigger.
Try the lamb while you are in New Zealand, it is fantastic!

Clothing & Weather:
We arrived March 10 and left March 23. We expected to have much cooler temperatures than we actually had. I’m not sure if this was the norm or if we just got super lucky. The weather was perfect, we only had one full day of rain. I ended up not wearing several of the warm items I brought along. Here are the essentials I’d pack again:
Thin quick dry hiking pants with zip off legs
Thermal top and bottoms
Quick dry shorts (2 pr)
Performance wear tanks (2)
Wool socks (2 pr)
Sweat pants and hoodie for lounging at night
T-shirt’s (2)
Hiking tights
Thin gloves, fleece hat (if hiking in alpine environments)
Good rain coat and possibly pants (never wore mine)
Swimsuit (shortie wetsuit not necessary if you don’t plan on swimming a long time)
The coolest temps we encountered were on the Mt. Ngauruhoe hike. I ended up wearing all of the layers I had with me, mostly do to hiking in the drizzle for a few hours and then the wind picked up.

Footwear:
In order of durability for extreme day hikes (20 plus miles) we had Steve wearing Altra trail runners, Josh with Saucony trail runners, Dell with the Nike trail runners (wore down the heels doing steep rocky descents and hurt my feet after about 17 miles), and finally Ashish sporting the Nike MetCons. The MetCons are great for CrossFit but not for long rugged hikes! He wore a hole in the bottom of the toe the first half of the Mt. Ngauruhoe and then proceeded to delaminate the sole on the other foot later on Routeburn. They also didn’t offer much traction at all.
I ended up switching out to my more industrial hikers for Routeburn and that made for a much more pleasant hike for me.
Bring flip flops (locals call them jandals, apparently) for relaxing and hiking the beach/creek.

Connectivity:
We used the iPad Pro and bought 5 gig of data through the GigSky plan. This was super easy to do, just fire up the cellular data on the iPad, choose the plan and you are good to go!
Connectivity is spotty once you leave the city areas and non existent for most of the mountainous areas. Steve download the Google Offline Maps to the iPad before leaving and that was super helpful!
If the GigSky plan says it is expired but it really isn’t, just reboot the device and it should be fine again. It may have just been our charging cord but we had to do a reboot often to stay connected.
Lots of cafes and hostels have WiFi but most are limited to 200 – 500 MB of data.
I used the app Blogo to write the wordpress blog offline and then upload when I get a good connection. It’s not a perfect system but it works so far!