Who said we don’t have jobs?
No really, we’re not unemployed. We have very important new jobs. For example, Brent’s new job title is CED - Chief Entertainment Director of Adventure New Zealand. And he spends just as much time planning in detail our adventures on the North and South Island as he did planning product launches in Silicon Valley. Every night, and most importantly, with every wifi opportunity, Brent whips open his spreadsheet and starts the meticulous job of planning trekking, mountaineering, biking, hiking and running plans for the next few months, or more often, for the next few days and weeks. I’m very grateful he feels so compelled to this task for two reasons. One, if we have even a hope of getting in an adequate shape to scale one of Mt Cook Park’s peaks in less than a month, we need all the hiking, running and climbing we can get. And second, this natural division of labor frees me up to be the expedition’s official chef and chronicler.
By far the biggest challenge for our CED, and for me as the chronicler, has so far been the availability, or more frequently, the lack of availability, of reliable wifi. In our experience on the North Island, when New Zealand businesses advertise “Internet”, they usually mean one of several arrangements:
- Wifi shows up under “available networks” but once connected, it doesn’t download any data
- The wifi is metered, i.e. conks out as soon as our offline iPhones start synching up offline photos to the cloud
- There was Internet at some point in time, probably dialup, but has been disconnected for over a decade
The situation explains why a bunch of blog posts appear at once - even though I may be writing them sequentially, I am doing so offline.
The second major challenge has been the website stability of DOC, the Department of Conservation in New Zealand. That’s the website for booking huts and campsites for a lot of the hikes we’re doing, including the Great Walks, like the Routeburn, the Kepler Track, Abel Tasman, Heaphy and any of the accommodations on Tongeriro National Park. The website is frequently down or slow, which adds to Brent’s job challenges. Once he can access the booking site, the availability is so patchy, that he needs to play tetris with all our complicated itinerary which involves several cars, two islands and more than a dozen different locations.
My occupational challenges are similar - wifi availability and fatigue dictate when I can catch up with my blog entries. And camping kitchen equipment with shared facilities a lot of times mean getting creative about cooking while still cooking fresh and healthy dishes in a campsite.
Nonetheless, these new jobs leave me and Brent pleasantly challenged and replenished and we still feel like we’re on an adventure of a lifetime.
