... and they're off!

Friends,

Welcome to Chris and Emeline's inaugural post on their New Zealand Blog of Fulfilling Adventure and Constant Excitement!!!

So, finally, the week has arrived! We're leaving! Tomorrow we fly from St Louis to LA, and then on Thursday we fly to Auckland, then to Christchurch, then to Dunedin (that'll be a fun day ... 23-and-a-half hours of traveling). We completely miss February 29th this Leap Year ... because we'll be flying west over the International Date Line. Who cares about February 29th anyway? And then, a week later, we start our jobs at the University of Otago, in sunny Dunedin, which is just a hop, skip and jump away from Antarctica, and icecaps and 6-month-long nights. Truthfully, we're just going for the hobbits. We want to breed them and market them back in the US.

So, when we land, we have to find a place to live. And it has to face north apparently, or we'll feel like hibernating in the winter. And we have to find a car, and cellphones, and a bank, and all that groovy stuff that we just left behind in Cincinnati.

We've had some mishaps and discomforts along the way: slept on couches for a week when we stored our bed; slept on the floor for a week when we sold our couches; gave most of our stuff away to Goodwill, etc. Last Saturday, we rented an SUV to drive the rest of our belongings from Cincinnati to St Louis and the transmission fell out of it ... in the fast lane, at 80mph. Seriously, people ... I mean, the engine fell out. Lots of sparks and smoke, and state troopers, and trucks to avoid. The tow-truck guy said he hadn't seen anything like it in 25-years of towing broken things. A near death experience. Floaty. White light. A tunnel.

But we survived it all, and we were helped through most of it by our wonderful friends. So we hope you find the time to check in and see what we're doing occasionally, on (drumroll):

Chris and Emeline's New Zealand Blog of Fulfilling Adventure and Constant Excitement!!!!! (CK)