Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand June-July 2022 - Written by Mary

The Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand voyage was a beautiful trip for our family! We always love a nice balance of travel where we stay places elongated amounts of time if possible (with less tourism), combined with a lot of quality family time. We also try to balance slowing down with being on the move, as well as adult activities with kid activities. We thought Australia would be a fine option for summer swim activities as long as we stayed north. We were correct in theory but it rained nearly our entire stay. We had to get creative with card games, movies and umbrellas! Although the weather strongly affected our trip, we don’t regret our Poly-Australian voyage as it would be so unlikely for us to visit Australia in the summer (USA winter). We thought better now than never! This has been a theme of our’s throughout our travels and I’m thankful for it! As soon as we landed on this trip, I felt an immediate ease of the developed world. From Hawaii to Australia to New Zealand, we embraced the ease of English, clean water, developed roads and electronic payments (typically we’re hustling to find cash as that’s more widely used in less developed countries). Every 3 to 4 days, we find it’s necessary to hit the easy button. This means we don’t rush out to a tour, don’t make the kids walk 5 miles and do what they want to do (like a time zone arcade that were scattered all over Australia). We ended up buying membership cards and frequenting the arcade! Although it feels funny to fly halfway across the world to spend money at a cheap arcade, our kids’ perspective of how special international travel is diminishes when we shove it down their throats every day! We loved experiencing the differences between Australia and New Zealand! This was one of my favorite parts! Some parts of Australia felt very much like parts of Asia on Semester at Sea, and the reminiscing was fun. We ignorantly thought Australia and NZ would be very similar. In fact, we found them to be incredibly different! New Zealand immediately reminded us of a Hawaii as they identify as a Polynesian country. Australia (Sydney specifically) sometimes felt like London, then Seattle, then San Francisco - almost like United States combined with Asia. If there was anything I disliked about Australia, it was that it was too much like America. Of course I love America, but I love grit with some culture shock when we travel. One of the main moments we were challenged and did experience culture shock was driving on the other side of the road. Fortunately we had a soft landing introducing this change in Cairns and Port Douglas (both small Australian cities) before we ventured into driving on highways and merging (like in downtown Auckland). We were forced to adjust, slow lane on the left, and wipers on the right side of the steering wheel :) Favorite cities (Wow we covered them all!) Lucy - Port Douglas Mikey - Cairns Andy - Sydney or Rotorua Mary - Sydney or Brisbane Rosie - Auckland