We are off for the Antipodes!

(Australia and New Zealand and Tasmania.)  

Our first crisis is Larry can’t take his Pay Days with him.  Rumor has it New Zealand will confiscate them and have even fined previous OAT tour members $400 for not declaring them in their luggage. Now that’s serious business!  However, this isn’t nearly so bad as the first explorers who found themselves attacked and eaten … the Maoris didn’t like interlopers.

It is also amazing that the first explorers looking for the fabled continent (Australia) managed to sail right through the Tasman Sea and not even realize Australia was there landing in New Zealand instead! 

“In their search for the vast ‘terra australis incognita’ (the unknown southern land) thought to lie in the Pacific, explorers made daring journeys across uncharted waters.

They did not find the fabled continent, but they did find New Zealand. First sighted by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, the country was later mapped by James Cook, the British seafarer who dominates the story of the European discovery of New Zealand.”

I expect you won’t hear from us for several days; we leave October 19th and cross the International Date Line and then after 15 hours and 20 minutes then another 4 hours to Auckland we’ll be zonkered.  But I do hope to keep up to date as much as I can on our journey and even add pictures if I figure out how.