Day Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six and Twenty-Seven - Across the globe to Christchurch

We've been in four countries and through sixteen timezones in the last three days across the globe, with 31 hours in the sky in total:

03/09/17 - New York to Dubai = 14 hours and 3 hour stop at airport
04/09/17 - Dubai to Sydney = 13 hours 45 mins and 2 hour stop at airport
05/09/17 - Sydney to Christchurch = 3 hours 15 mins

We finally arrived in Christchurch at lunchtime on Tuesday, having left New York at 11am on the Sunday - quite the journey. We barely got any sleep on the plane but actually felt alright when we arrived surprisingly. The jetlag hasn't been too bad, with the clocks going forward all the time we were in the air - we think it has somehow all worked itself out. We started the journey five hours behind the UK but in Christchurch we are eleven hours ahead. The only downside is that Emily has caught a cold on the journey to NZ.

All our flights were smooth, on time, the staff were great and it was an absolute pleasure to fly with Emirates. The Airbus A380-800 is an incredible machine, the largest commercial aircraft in the sky, seating nearly 900 passengers at full capacity in all economy set-up. Each aircraft contains 330 miles of wiring with a maximum take off weight of nearly 600 tonnes. We racked up 13000 miles each on our air-miles accounts which can be spent on a variety of things including tickets to the Melbourne Cup in early November.

We picked up our campervan yesterday and we love it. It's self contained, meaning we have a toilet, a shower, cooking facilities, electricity, central heating and everything you could imagine you'll need. We have to empty waste, top up fresh water for the sink and the shower and also refill the gas for the heating and the cooker which will keep us busy. We did a food shop yesterday and filled the fridge with healthy food and look forward to doing a bit of cooking after several airline meals over the last few days, not that they were bad at all.

We found a nice campsite by the east coast overnight and slept for about twelve hours and we feel refreshed this morning. We left the campsite at noon and have found a public library nearby where we have wifi enabling us to write this blog. We are currently sat next to a group of old grannies who are part of the local Scrabble club! We don't have a concrete plan for our four weeks in New Zealand but we have some key locations marked down that we really want to visit. We'll spend three weeks on the larger but less populated South Island before catching the ferry to Auckland on the North Island for our final week where we'll return the campervan.

Highlights over the past few days - Landing safely and picking up the campervan!

(No pictures as it's not letting us upload them!)