Up in the air and all at sea; it's (almost) decision time

Poor old blog, all neglected cos of those durned kids... not true, actually: they're full on of course but the real spare-time sponge is this NZ thing: the trivial formalities of finding work, applying for visas, sussing out flights, negotiating shipping rates and looking for somewhere to live. In that order. Kind of transcending this list is the vexing question of what things to buy before we go vs how much we want to pay to ship it over there. Basically, there's no Ikea in NZ. No really, I'm not kidding, apparently they've been banned for fear of them becoming too popular. Although there are conflicting rumours that they may have acquired a site somewhere near Auckland, we're not prepared to leave a house full of cheap plastic novelties and matchstick furniture to chance.

Then there's the flight thing. Price aside, it should be a simple case of choosing your stop-over destination, right? Wrong. If you Go West with Air New Zealand, they allow you a staggering 46kg per person baggage allowance, making it a no-brainer for us clutter-magnet migrants. Except your stop over is in the United States of Antipathy, who are so close to disappearing up their own collective arses it's possibly the scariest place in the world to be right now. We've heard some real horror stories about US immigration, including the right of customs officials to confiscate your laptop/iPod/cellphone without warning or pretext. Sod that, then, we'll go east and travel light. Ha. If we max out hand luggage and hold allowance we can still take around 140 kilos. That's almost an entire Ikea trip :) It's a shame, I was looking forward to visiting San Francisco for some pioneering-spirit inspiration, but if it means a compulsory visit to the bottom inspectors they can stick it.

Shipping's another thing that could be a nightmare if we don't work it right. One plan would be to move all our stuff from here back to Spain, reunite it with all the other stuff in Maria's garage and ship everything, ourselves included, from there (we go on the plane, of course, not in the container...) (leastways, that's the plan...) – if not, we have to ship from here as well, which we could do by combining our stuff with Anne's, except she probably won't be out until next year and all our UK stuff constitutes our "everyday" chattels we really can't do without for that long. More than 4 weeks without me big wok and I start to go a bit funny. The long shot is to go with the nice firm who shipped our stuff here from Spain, who are mad keen to quote us for shipping everything else in Spain out here first before dispatching the whole lot to Kiwiland. They're more nuts than we are.

We've only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as finding a place to rent is concerned. It's not too expensive and there's plenty to see online, but no way do we want to pick something before we get there and see it in person. Methinks the trailerpark beckons! A bit of camping could be fun and make up for the cancelled summer trip round Europe; it's just a pity we probably won't be able to move early enough to ride the school holidays out & straight into the wild blue yonder. Even though it sometimes feels like we need months to prepare everything, we would go tomorrow if we could. The fact that we don't have a formal job offer yet is neither here nor there...