Is There a Top or a Bottom to One's Bucket List?

When asked what was on my bucket list of travel destinations, New Zealand has always been at the top (or does one seek to get to the bottom of the list?) of mine.  Ever since seeing the first Lord of the Rings movie back in 2001, I have wanted to visit.  I had never been to Australia or New Zealand, and when faced with the reality of just how far away those places are, we were invariably asked "why don't you do both countries at the same time."  I never seriously considered that, and if I asked if I had a preference, New Zealand was always the clear and easy winner.

Traveling as far as the literal other side of the world would demand more than a traditional week-long vacation, and with the reality of the southern hemisphere having reverse seasons, I guess I always knew we'd have to visit during our winter.  Earlier this year, we decided to finally bite the bullet and go "down under" over the Christmas/New Year break.  That would allow Anna to come along -- and she had threatened us with bodily harm if she couldn't go with us -- and also make the fact of missing so much time from work more palatable.

Planning started early in the new year, as I tried to secure award airline tickets the day the booking calendar opened.  Even with that foresight, it was very quickly evident that the holiday weeks are, in fact, the highest of high season for New Zealand, so the reality of finding award tickets quickly dimmed.  I even went against my normal modus operandi, and retained a "booking expert," to track ticket availability.  After weeks of searching, she too admitted that our prospects were all but non-existent.  This was all compounded by the reality that I did not think I could make such a long trip in a coach airline seat.  I dreaded the thought, and we decided that if we were going to go, we were going to make it worth our while and do everything we could to book business-class tickets.

As I continued to search for award tickets, I also tracked revenue fares, and tried every conceivable combination of fares that could be upgraded, or buying multiple tickets, and all kinds of "creative" routings.  I can't recall how I first stumbled onto it, but I found a very attractive round-trip business-class fare on Air China, from New York to Auckland, via Beijing.  While Air China flies non-stop from Dulles, the cost of that routing was about 50% more expensive than the New York routing.  Having decided to pull the trigger on those tickets, an extended period of planning followed.  I wanted to maximize our time, and seeing that it was high season, everything I read emphasized that I had to book as far in advance as possible for hotels and activities.  With the tickets purchased in March 2019, I then spent the next month or so finalizing our itinerary and booking everything I could in advance.  Even with the two weeks we had managed to squeeze in between Anna's end of term and New Years, it was clear we could only see a subset of what New Zealand had to offer.  Our favorite tour company -- Gate 1 -- actually does a two-week trip to New Zealand.  We looked into booking it, and taking out all the guess work, but they did not offer an option for triple rooms, and the trip left a day earlier than we planned.  Having no idea that far out when Anna's final exams might occur, it was too much of a risk to book the earlier date, aside from the prohibitive cost differential.  In the end, I ended up pretty much parroting the Gate 1 itinerary, day for day.  That also allowed us to augment things as we wanted, but also gave me an idea of what was feasible on a day-to-day basis, especially for traveling between towns along the way.

With everything in place and, for all intents and purposes, everything booked in advance by April -- even our Christmas Day dinner -- that left us with eight long months of anticipation.  Even with all that, our ultimate departure was fraught with uncertainty up to the very end.

The Gate 1 Itinerary We Closely Mirrored