I’m Going On An Adventure

On Friday, I’m off to Middle-Earth.

Well, I’m off to New Zealand. Well, first I fly to Dubai, and then I fly to Australia for a few days, and then I fly to New Zealand. And I is in fact we, because my wife and I are off on our honeymoon at last. But apart from all those minor details…

The other side of the world. When we get off these flights it’ll be the farthest away from home we’ve ever been. We have two weeks of driving around this far green country to look forward to, from glittering caves to pristine beaches, bookended by a few days down under at either end. There’ll be a lot of walking, too; I want to see mountains, mountains, and probably climb a bit up them as well. It is a long holiday, a very long holiday, but I suspect we shall return.

And yes, I am making sure to use as many Lord of the Rings quotes as possible, because we are both enormous nerds and the fact that my wife’s family are actually from New Zealand is pretty much a secondary concern behind the sheer amount of LOTR stuff that we’re going to visit. If I remember the gloriously colour-coded itinerary correctly there are at least four different tours of different bits of set on the horizon, including Hobbiton itself, around which we will in fact be running an eleventy-one kilometre race (well, 11.1km). How much air resistance does a cloak provide? We’re going to find out.

We have wildlife to meet, we have hikes to do, we have delicious foods to taste and we have wonders to see. It’s only the North island, because we’d need another month to get around the entire country, but that just means we’ll have to go back some day. Oh no.

It’s been a long time in the planning, this trip, and though all the last-minute prep and packing is a bit of a nightmare, we cannot wait.

So there’ll be no blog next week, because I will have just landed on the other side of the world and I probably won’t even know my own name, let alone which way is up. (I’ll still write something, of course, but I imagine they won’t be the most coherent 500 words of my career.) But I will post a few updates on the stuff we’ve seen as we go. There are wonders to behold out there, as the legion of former LOTR extras will be eager to show us.

And I do actually quite like a long flight. It’s a very long few flights, of course, but being forced to sit down for hours with nothing but all my technology and literature for company is approaching my idea of heaven before we even land. I have a new(er) Kindle, which is working nicely so far, the Steam spring sale starts the day before we fly, I’ve got a solo pen-and-paper RPG I’ve been saving and if my wife is sufficiently distracted I’ll nick her laptop and finally try Baldur’s Gate 3.

And I’ll write. I have some short edits to do, some more submissions to make. And I’ll still be writing every day while we’re away, because that stops for nothing. And I’ll be writing in a new and far-off country, a new environment, breathing new air and seeing new sights, and I honestly cannot wait to see what that does to the words I put on the page. I wrote The Singer while thinking of home – what world might I conjure out there in New Zealand?

At some point, you’ll find out.