And We're Off!
Greetings from Mama and Papa Wang's couch in Raleigh, NC!
Thanks for signing up for our newsletter and welcome to the first edition. Today we finally embark on our journey for realsies, leaving for New Zealand in a few short hours.
What have we been up to until now?
Vacated our SF homes
Bags on bags on bags of donations + sold a few things at Wasteland, Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads. (The inside of the car is also filled. 90% of this is Ivy's)
Stored some things at Tommy's
(Everything in front is Owen's, Ivy's just got the one suitcase)
Got our Japan and New Zealand visas!
...Except Owen didn’t for New Zealand
Just as Ivy was laughing at Owen, she saw that she too made a mistake, though hers was remedied within a day while Owen went through several stages of additional background checks, hours of waiting on customer support with New Zealand Immigration, and days of waiting on an unresponsive case officer (literally her average response rate was once every 9 days).
Had our last SF date
Ivy wrote about some of her favorite views for our friends still in the Bay, check it out!
Scratched Jon's car
A mistake worth about 7 months rent in Bali :(
We've screwed up a couple of other times recently, making this move quite a costly one...
But we made it out on Thanksgiving Day and went on to Ottawa, where Owen won the approval of Ivy’s mom and dog
And we took a pilgrimage to Lisgar Collegiate Institute, a school that contributed much to Owen’s life, producing his prodigious girlfriend and two of his best friends
All this time, we shopped online for camping and travel gear, and it was all waiting for us at our next destination: Raleigh, North Carolina
...and so were Owen's parents, and a sudden 1 inch snow "storm" that caused a state of emergency and 300k people to experience blackouts across NC and its neighboring states.
Can you spot us in this picture?
With abundant time house-bound by the storm, we were able to sort through our remaining life possessions. If you want details on everything we're bringing with us, you can read about that here
In case you forgot, Owen still had not received his New Zealand visa yet. With our flight coming up, we applied for working holiday visas to Australia as a back-up and received those within 4 hours.
We heard Sydney has the best fireworks for New Years Eve, so we debated booking tickets there straight off our flight to Auckland. Just as we were thinking about pulling the trigger... Owen received his visa last night, literally the day before we leave.
And with that we've wrapped up all the logistics necessary before we're off! Let us know what you want to hear from these newsletters, if this format and length is enjoyable for you, etc. And while you're replying, also let us know if you have any friends in the area or if you want to come visit :) We'll be in New Zealand at least until mid-March.
Many people have asked how we're feeling. Up until now, there’s mostly just been stress from meeting the parents and taking care of logistics, but now the excitement is starting to hit us! There's still a lot to figure out once we actually get there, but for now we're just daydreaming about the epic nature ahead, which we'll leave you with a picture of.
Onwards,
Ivy & Owen