utopia island (now with nice playgrounds)

new zealand aka Aotearoa aka middle earth aka our last stop

Welcome to our penultimate post, chronicling our final stop on the BTIF world tour! You’re probably noticing we’ve picked up the publication pace by four or five orders of magnitude. Liz is concerned that with the birth of Chester’s soon-to-be sister (~two weeks from now) we’ll forget everything about our lives from before July 14th, 2025, so we should wrap this increasingly hapless writing project.

Picking up where we left off, we venture from Singapore to New Zealand….

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New Zealand was an all star final destination for an influencer family composed of an ever more pregnant woman, an ever more mobile toddler, and a guy carrying all of the aforementioned party’s bags. Notwithstanding the mediocre food¹, it earned its reputation as a vacationers’ paradise. The mountains are better, the forests are better, the biking is (way) better, even the playgrounds feel like they’re from a more enlightened near-future.

nz in a nutshell

Alex’s parents, Patty (Mimi) and Dick (Papa), decamped to this island nation for the winter’s entirety, and so we traveled with them and had the added support of two eager babysitters at every turn. Notably, this enabled:

1. Date night at Fat Pipi’s Pizzeria in Hokitika (terrible pizza, questionable name, great hats)

2. An end of trip “retreat” wherein Liz and Alex holed up in a hotel room to do various visioning and planning exercises to optimize their future² (i.e. now), punctuated only by a screening of Wicked (which Liz liked, to Alex’s surprise.)

3. A separate end of trip retreat to Queenstown, Milford Sound, and most notably Doubtful Sound wherein Alex fished for fish, Liz vomited on the fish, they both ate freshly caught lobster and a school of dolphins flirted with the boat in a downright magical sendoff. They also comforted their retiree shipmates, overcome with anxiety having ended their careers and lamenting the still elusive notion of a life’s purpose.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We started our tour in the northern part of the south island³, in the town of Nelson near Abel Tasman National Park. Our otherwise excellent Airbnb didn’t have air conditioning, so we quickly assimilated with the fauna (i.e. crazy bugs) of the area at night when leaving the windows open. We got in a pleasant coastal bike ride, a fun Patty Simon signature mini Christmas celebration, and sadly only one stop at the local ice cream purveyor.

photogenic big trip influencer family in abel tasman

Abel Tasman was the thing to visit on this chapter, and we enjoyed cruising around in amphibious vessels to explore the beaches, birds, and utopian terrain of this coastal wonderland.

Then one of many epic-but-crammed drives on to Hokitika, a town that felt about as “end-of-the-earth” as it was. In Hokitika we took some of the best bike rides of our lives. Think: Donkey Kong Country on Super Nintendo meets an e-bike and perfect weather.

Chester - Papa - Alex

Then onto a place we’re forgetting the name of near a famous glacier we’re forgetting the name of. Our Airbnb was sprawling and came with pet sheep/chickens, and an assortment of children’s toys that were eerily identical to those Chester already had. Regrettably the weather prevented seeing much of the wondrous glacier we found ourselves near. Alex finally learned what Monopoly Deal was.

Then to Wanaka. Peter Thiel was right to buy up a bunch of land (which he’s since sold?) around here… it’s the platonic ideal of where you’d want to spend the apocalypse.

looking for tech billionaires’ estates on lake wanaka

Then Liz and Alex fled to the aforementioned “Milford/Doubtful Sound vacation”.

Then to Twizel for tasty fresh salmon sashimi, barren but beautiful bike rides, and aquamarine lakes resembling the beach scene in Contact (so perfect they looked fake).

though inaccurate in almost every way, this is a pleasant depiction of our itinerary

The penultimate stop of our NZ experience was in a valley that reminded Alex of the valley in his favorite Lord of the Rings scenes because we were in fact in that same valley, and ever a fan of meta experiences he forced everyone to watch a few Lord of the Rings films whilst overlooking said valley. This only took about 45% of their six day stay in Glenorchy. Other highlights included

• The helicopter ride to end all helicopter rides - up to a glacier, up again to a waterfall, and back down. If you’re intimidated by the price, bite the bullet and do it… we were all blown away. Except for Chester, who is obsessed with looking at helicopters but didn’t seem to register that he was inside one when he was.

  

  helicopter apathy

• Going to one of the forests in Lord of the Rings, which resembled an ordinary forest.

• A four hour round-trip excursion to Hobbiton from Auckland on our final day of the trip. The heat was pretty unforgiving, but the chance to walk freely among the sets and investigate the cupboards of the hobbit holes made it completely worth it.

he enjoyed this hobbit/chester-sized rocking horse for 15 minutes.

After consuming a last plate of hipster pasta, chatting with the weary owner of a posh brunch café, and getting Alex a quick haircut, we boarded our overnight flight to America. We weren’t really sure what to expect upon arriving home given the state of home but were pleasantly surprised to find cheerful airport workers who only confiscated one avocado. In no time we were landing in Atlanta to dine with Liz’s parents, Uncle Alex & his new Danish girlfriend, Caroline at the restaurant above one of Liz’s favorite ATL establishments (and a perfect abrupt and jolting reentry into Americana,) the Clermont Lounge.

the last supper

We started our first morning in the USA by celebrating a second, belated Christmas at Liz’s parents’ mountain house and Aunt Victoria shocked everyone with a surprise appearance!

After a couple of days’ rest in northern Georgia, the BTIF journeyed north, arriving home from their worldwide adventure on Monday, January 27th where they’ve been living happily ever after.

~The End~

P.S. It’s not the end, stay tuned for our super duper final final post! Then you can happily unsubscribe unless you’d like to stick around for the next iteration of this newsletter wherein Chester types random things using his new “computer” we “built” for him.⁴

1. The real-fruit soft serve ice cream and a single standout Thai restaurant in a shopping center were the two bad-food exceptions.

2. They kinda worked!

3. Dick and Patty enjoy extreme takes on travel destinations and vowed to spend no time on the North Island, for fear that it wouldn’t be quite as epic an outdoor destination. Since our only exposure to the North Island was Auckland/Hobbiton, we agreed with this take unless you’re a hobbit.

4. It’s a cardboard box.