I suppose a catch up post should start where this site left off (and we ARE due a catch up!). The last you heard from us, we were staying in the Bay of Islands near the northern tip of New Zealand. The couple of months since then have been very busy and a little bit complicated. We’ve had to tweak our upcoming plans a little bit but we’re pretty excited about the new countries we’ll hopefully be getting to. We’ll post more about that next week once everything has been locked in a bit more and we have a better idea of what we’ll be doing. In the meantime, our time in NZ, while busy, has had it’s moments of relaxation, family time, and heaps of fun. After the Bay of Islands we went on an awesome summer road trip down to the Coromandel (where we had 4 stormy days of rain) before driving on to Tauranga and Mt Maunganui where we stayed for about a week. I think we’ve given up on Coromandel as every time we’re there we get nothing but rain! Luckily Tauranga has always been the opposite of that for us and our luck continued; nearly every day we went for walks and swam down at the beautiful Mt Maunganui beach and generally had a very chilled out time staying in our lovely little Airbnb accommodation (amazingly the first time we’ve successfully booked through Airbnb).

Can you spot Matt in that first redwoods image?

It’s a good thing too because once we got to Napier, things got busy and stayed that way until up to last week. In Napier, Matt and I were Best Man and Bridesmaid respectively for our good friends Cath & Jono as they got married at the gorgeous Old Church. I didn’t get a chance to take any photos but here’s a slideshow of the day that their amazing photographer put together.

The wedding theme continued from there to Wellington where Matt’s sister Josie had not one, but TWO wedding ceremonies which were dubbed the Red Wedding and the White Wedding (a nod to Game of Thrones although far less bloody and terrifying). Once again I was too busy helping and recording video for the White Wedding (and Matt was busy being the MC – he did a great job too!) so I didn’t get any photos. I did, however, get a few of the Indian ceremony. It was my first time attending an Indian ceremony and I think it’s safe to say we all really enjoyed it. It was so interesting to see the different traditions and ceremonious aspects of an Indian wedding, plus I got to wear a sari!

We are in Wellington for another 2 weeks before we head off on our travels once again. And this time we’re going to a couple of NEW countries. Yay! (it’s weird to think we left London in December and although we’ve been to plenty of new places we still haven’t visited a new country). We’re still in the midst of booking everything and making sure what we want to do is actually going to work out. We were originally flying in to Thailand for a month but fingers crossed that will be changing to Sri Lanka and we’ll go from there. Like I said earlier, we’ll talk more about that and other plans in our next post once we’ve locked it all in!