One Last Call for 'Merica

So this is it: NZ-Day. The day we've all been waiting for. The day I leave the United States for at least three years to settle in a place literally on the opposite side of the world. Okay, technically Spain is the exact opposite of Christchurch, but still. Close enough.

Niko traveling to Arizona in Kara's
Ford Explorer Sport-Trac.

The past three weeks have involved two things: shopping and packing. And both have been tedious. As soon as we got to Arizona, we started unpacking the two cars. This took three days all in itself. Then the real work of storing everything in the basement and elsewhere around Kara's house began. A lot of the basement got reorganized so that all of my LEGOs, games, and our other stuff could be stored in a corner. That only got finished three days ago.

The next task was completing our collection of clothing and other materiel that will be needed in our tour-of-duty in New Zealand. The list was long and we spent about a week of shopping off-and-on to get everything, especially trying to get good quality clothes cheaply. It was difficult and in the end, a few new items had to be cut and returned due to space issues.

That bring me to our last task for the past two weeks: packing. We have six 50-pound pieces of luggage and, fortunately, discovered that our carry-ons do not, in fact, include our personal items in their 15-pound weight limit. This was a recent change but something that helped us greatly. We decided to include one large packing box as one of our pieces of luggage. We also decided to buy a new suitcase/carryon combo from Costco. It was expensive but worth it. We now have two free-spinning suitcases that will be easy to move when needed.

Trying to pack these suitcases and keep them under 50-pounds has been one giant game of Musical Chairs. It has taken two weeks just to pack and repack these things. We only finished yesterday. We leave on Sunday. Yeah, cutting it close. We probably spent around 20 hours packing, weighing, and repacking these to get them right.

Free time has not really happened. I've been busily backing up all my DVDs on my external hard drive so we have things to watch in New Zealand while also downloading TV shows. We even broke the Internet in the process. Oops! Things are mostly under control now but the next two days are still going to be busy right until the end. Niko's all prepared for his trip, probably better prepared than us.

Fingers crossed that the remaining items will come together before Sunday. Stay tuned!