Flight summary follows. Qantas: very good. Kids: great. Sleep: taken where it could be got. Customs failed to care about our coffee:

Customs: What are you declaring?
Us: Coffee.
Customs: Any honey or fruit juice?
Us: No, it’s coffee.
Customs: Ok, through you go.

I swear, you could be declaring the bloody Hope Diamond and all they’d ask is, “any honey in it?”

I had to push my family to come, and it wasn’t easy. They all had comfortable lives in the US, but I knew that I really preferred New Zealand and that if I stayed in the US for much longer then I’d never escape. I was losing my accent, losing my idiom (“honey, I’ll put the trash in the trunk”), but not really happy with what I got in return: debt to buy a house, free and easy credit card debt, a too-fast lifestyle, and participation in an economy that supports politics I don’t believe in.

All that’s easy to say, and I’ve said it before (“don’t want to live in a red state, can’t afford to live in a blue state” was how I ended up phrasing it) but actually making the move: not so easy. In particular, I hadn’t been in New Zealand for 18 months and in that time I’d lost the feeling, the images, the drive. I knew that I wanted to be in New Zealand, and I could give you intellectual reasons why I thought it would be good, but I could no longer feel that I was doing the right thing.

The instant I stepped out of the airport, I knew I had done the right thing. The smell of the air, the green, the friendly laid-back people: it all came rushing back. And that feeling of, “my god, this IS the best country in the world!”, still hasn’t worn off.

We live about an hour from the airport, so we had to hire a taxi to take us home. We’d called ahead for Warkworth Taxis, $150 for the trip. They sent a too-mini-van which we had to work hard to fit our gear into, but once assembled like a broken luggage Tetris in which the complete lines failed to vanish, we cruised off happily. Jenine and I were kept busy ooh-ing and aah-ing at new things (bus lane to Albany! The park’n’ride center at Albany! They’re extending the motorway to Puhoi!) while Jenine and the kids weren’t sleeping.

We stopped for a pie on the way up, unpacked once we got home, and I took the kids to the beach while Jenine slept. The beach wasn’t cold, but wasn’t hot either–comfort was a mental trick and not a physical given. The kids loved it: William swum and Raley dug in the sand, and together they whiled away an hour on a beach we had to ourselves because it’s November and not January. Heaven!

By the time I returned, Jenine had found that our fridge was no longer going. I puttered off to Leigh to find someone to repair it, but without luck. When I got back, my aunty had dropped off the DSL modem that my uncle had ordered for us earlier in the month. Yes, we have DSL but no fridge. Nerd much?

Speaking of the house, we’re in shock. It’s tiny, smaller than we remembered. We shouldn’t have packed the 40’ container. It’s Too Much Stuff. We should have sold it all and started again. But that’s easy to say now, and was impossible for us to deal with back then. The good news is that with DSL we can surf TradeMe quickly to get an idea of how much we’d make from selling the stuff from the container (which will arrive late December–expect furious purges of the house until then).

The highlight of the day: fish and chips for dinner. Oh so good. I feel like I ate an entire school of gurnard. We followed them up with kumara chips (kumara are like sweet potato, but infinitely more delicious and perfect and … excuse me, I have to go eat some more) and then passed out.

I stayed up and made a movie of the sunset. The iSight isn’t a great video camera, but I fear I packed the Firewire cable that would connect my real video camera, so you’ll have to make do. Next up: a webcam.

At the end of Day 0, the first day back, I can only say that it all seems perfect so far for me. It’s not easy for the family: I know Jenine’s quietly missing her friends, and the kids have cried because they miss their friends too. I miss my virtual friends (I’ve been so busy I haven’t had much of a chance to AIM with them) and only had a few friends in Fort Collins, whom I’d see once a week if that, so I’m more able to make the transition.

I’m hoping, of course, that we make new (local) friends to fill the gaps and make it clear that we’re moving to a new life, and not pointlessly scrapping the old one. And with that, good night!