What a day in our nomadic life looks like in NZ

What a typical day looks like for us

This nomad life of camping has been more like a job than either of us expected. It sounds nice to think ‘oh we’re going on a 5 month vacation’ except that it is not really a relaxation vacation when you camp most of the time to keep expenses low. I definitely don’t mean to sound ungrateful or like I’m complaining, just telling the reality of it. We are very grateful for this experience.

We wake up sometime between 7-8am. Stuff our sleeping bags into stuffsacks, deflate and roll up our thermarests, and take everything out of the tent and put it in Dave’s backpack in the back seat of the car. Then we break down the tent. This process takes about 20-30 minutes.

Then we either cook where we camped or drive to find a picnic table preferably with a nice view. We usually cook eggs and some type of breakfast meat. And we’ll have coffee and juice. Then we wash dishes. It’s amazing how little water you need to actually wash, but it takes way more to rinse.  This process takes about 30-45 minutes. Then we find somewhere to throw our trash away.

Either before or after breakfast we often look for somewhere to shower, but sometimes we’ll do this in the evening instead. Sometimes we’ll skip a day if we weren’t very active. This can be an hour ordeal of looking up a place, driving to it, the actual showering, and refilling our water bottles.

Next we start driving to whatever destination we have planned to explore that day. A few times we have had an excursion planned, but mostly we go on long hikes or walk through cute towns. New Zealand has a lot of natural beauty and interesting landscapes due to the history of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes as well as having been mostly under the sea for a long time so there is a lot to see. We usually only spend 1-2 days in any given area, unless we really like it or there is more to see and do. Deciding what to do, where to go, what to see and what we are willing to pay is a daily practice. Often the passenger is looking through travel books to figure out the next destination and trying to make sure we are not missing something important.

As we go along we make sure things are getting charged such as camera batteries, phone, laptop, etc. We decided to buy an inverter early on since we are on the road and camp more than we are near outlets. Often we stop to take pictures just off the side of the road.

We stop at some point and eat something for lunch. Initially we were eating way more than we were burning in calories and were cooking a hot lunch every time. After a couple of weeks of this we realized it was unnecessary as well as consumed precious time and fuel, and that we just were not that hungry nor did we need to eat that much. Just like breakfast, lunch can take anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes. Now we may either eat a sandwich or skip lunch altogether and eat an early dinner around 5pm.

Our “kitchen” is in the back of our little hatchback car. We keep about 15 liters of water at a time with several bottles in the front to just drink. Most is in our ‘kitchen’ to use for cooking and dishwashing. We are always on the lookout for places to fill these back up. Thankfully NZ has plenty of delicious water. We have a cooler on the right and a box on the left with tall items in it. Random items are in between the two. It’s still kind of a mess, but it works.

Everyday we have to make sure the cooler is drained and we have to purchase ice about every other day. We also have to grocery shop every two to three days since we don’t have that much space. The cooler (which they call a ‘chilly bin’ hahaha) has been quite the ordeal at times  as water has leaked into some of our food on more than one occasion. We have yet to find a brand of ziplock bags here that do not leak.

Around 6pm we start to look for a place to freedom camp if we haven’t found something on the Campermate app that’s close by with good reviews. We usually find something pretty easily and this is actually an enjoyable part of the trip, however we have camped at some places where the weather ended up being horrible a few times. It doesn’t get dark until close to 10pm so there is plenty of time in the evening to find a place and get set up.

Setting up at night involves pitching and staking the tent, blowing up our thermarests, unstuffing our sleeping bags, grabbing headlamps, and sleep wear. We brush our teeth and I wash my face. Again this takes about 30-45 minutes. Often Dave and I will take turns catching up on our blog. We usually go to sleep around 10pm.

Also, at some point during our day we do Bible study together. Originally we were doing this individually, but decided we needed to refocus our faith as a couple. And it has been a huge blessing.

Every approximate 8 days, or sooner if there is bad weather, we will stay somewhere to get all of our laundry washed and reorganize our car. Even though it has been a lot of work, it has saved us a lot of money to camp and has been totally worth it.

 

Note: Things have been MUCH different since arriving to Australia, but more on that in a future post.