{"id":701,"date":"2007-02-01T17:03:26","date_gmt":"2007-02-02T01:03:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/GoneSouthV3\/?p=701"},"modified":"2007-02-01T17:03:26","modified_gmt":"2007-02-02T01:03:26","slug":"trip-summary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/trip-summary\/","title":{"rendered":"Trip Summary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>For our honeymoon, Carrie and I wanted to do something special. We&#8217;d both been avid cyclists and backpackers, but we&#8217;d never tried to put the two together. When fantasizing about our honeymoon, we chose New Zealand as our destination because of the country&#8217;s vast backpacking options and its diverse landscape. We then had to figure out how to get around the country. Renting a car was possible but expensive. Using the tourist buses would be cheaper but not offer enough freedom to go where and when we pleased. That&#8217;s when we considered getting around by bike, or <a href=\"http:\/\/theletter.co.uk\/images\/lc\/wooden_push_bikes.jpg\">push bike<\/a> as the Kiwis say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" scrolling=\"no\" marginheight=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/maps\/ms?ie=UTF8&amp;hl=en&amp;msa=0&amp;msid=214153806846627131259.000488047edd50a5ef8e9&amp;ll=-41.640078,172.96875&amp;spn=13.130531,26.015625&amp;z=5&amp;output=embed\" width=\"100%\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>View our trip around <a href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/maps\/ms?ie=UTF8&amp;hl=en&amp;msa=0&amp;msid=214153806846627131259.000488047edd50a5ef8e9&amp;ll=-41.640078,172.96875&amp;spn=13.130531,26.015625&amp;z=5&amp;source=embed\">New Zealand<\/a> in a larger map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Little did we know that bicycle touring is quite the popular mode of travel for a lot of people. And by people I mean Europeans. And by Europeans I mean Germans. Americans equate bicycle touring to homelessness. If you&#8217;re not in a car you&#8217;re a bum. Well we bums had a dandy time. We rode about 3500km throughout both of New Zealand&#8217;s main islands from February 1\u2013May 7, 2007, an average of 40km per day. That doesn&#8217;t sound like much riding, but we also mixed in some multi-night backpacking trips and other fun non-cycling activities, which did not include any trampoline bouncing, but it could have. We saw more trampolines than sheep. If football and pork rinds are American pastimes, it&#8217;s safe to say that Kiwi pastimes are driving with boats and training for gymnastics. Traveling by bicycle offers so much cultural education!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are those reading this that might wonder how we&#8217;re able to skip town for three jobless months. Well first off, we made a savings plan and stuck to it for over a year. By December 2006, we&#8217;d saved enough to buy the plane tickets and to travel on a reasonable budget of US$60 a day. I decided to quit my job in January in order to pack away our modest amount of possessions for storage, to create this website, and to do a bunch of miscellaneous tasks it takes to leave town for a while. Carrie continued to work and got a leave of absence from her boss. It also helped that we&#8217;re both cheapskates. We minimized nights out on the town, abused library privileges, and limited buying only things that might come in handy on the trip. It&#8217;s the small steps that really save the most money at the end (hint: we don&#8217;t have lives).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For our honeymoon, Carrie and I wanted to do something special. We&#8217;d both been avid cyclists and backpackers, but we&#8217;d never tried to put the two together. When fantasizing about our honeymoon, we chose New Zealand as our destination because of the country&#8217;s vast backpacking options and its diverse landscape. We then had to figure [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[17],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rideeatcamp.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}