"So I heard you're moving..."

Katie and I are, in fact, uprooting ourselves and leaving the U.S. It has felt strange for me to hear it described as “moving to New Zealand”, though, because we do intend to return. In the meantime, this blog will be our way of keeping family and friends updated on our travels. Ask anyone who has tried to keep in touch with me via text or social media and you will find that I’m no good at it. Katie is better, but a blog seems like a more streamlined approach to sharing updates with all the people who may want them. We intend this blog to be the central repository of not just news from our lives, but also lessons learned, tidbits of wisdom gathered, and questions unanswered. We also encourage our readers to leave comments and questions: engage with us, push us to expound and explain.

This will be a casual blog: we will not stand on ceremony. We may alternate authors, we may write some posts together, and our timing will also vary. Our first couple of months in New Zealand will be spent backpacking with minimal access to power and internet. We will likely post whenever we have a town day, with 4-9 day stretches of hiking in between. Later in our journey, as we find sedentary lodging for a few months, I aim to publish a post bi-weekly.

My final note on the blog itself will be to address its name. Moose is the name of our cat, who remains at home in Parkdale, OR while we tramp about. “Missive” is a fortunately alliterative synonym for a letter. One must suspend one’s sense of pride in order to publish a blog under any title, and we feel that this title strikes an appropriately corny tone.

Now, a quick layout of our itinerary, such as it is so far:

• Feb. 9, we fly from Seattle to Tokyo
• We’ll spend about 3 days in Tokyo before flying to Hokkaido, one of Japan’s northern islands
• Feb. 13-19, we have a rigorous rotation of backcountry and resort skiing, hot springs (onsen), and 7-11 stops
• Feb. 20th, we’ll jump in to summer in Auckland, New Zealand. Our focus will be surfing, sim cards, and bank accounts.
• Feb. 22nd, we fly to Christchurch on the South Island, where we’ll spend a couple days visiting with friends and finding storage for gear we won’t need while backpacking.
• March+April will be spent backpacking the South Island portion of the Te Aroroa (TA)–New Zealand’s long trail (more on that later).
• May + June will find us starting jobs in Queenstown or Wanaka, the southern mountain towns of the South Island. We plan to settle in near a ski resort and enjoy the winter.
• We’ll stay in the country and enjoy all the adventures and lessons we can all the way through November, 2025.

Some other FAQs:

• Why New Zealand? I’ll let Katie write her own reasons in another post soon. For me, New Zealand popped onto my radar thanks to seasonal coworkers with the Forest Service from CO to OR, and the idea was reinforced by my sister’s visit. I intended to spend my winter off-season there in 2022, until I accepted a year-round job. The descriptions and depictions I’ve encountered of the country’s outdoor sports, ecology, and laid-back culture landed it at the top of my travel-list. I’ve always wanted to spend several months there, at least, and to afford that will require working there. Hence my interest in the Working Holiday Visa, which you must apply for before turning 30. That age limit has made this trip more pressing for me. When I met Katie and she mentioned her plans for a New Zealand trip? Well, that just sealed the deal.
• Do you have jobs? No, not yet. But we can pursue temporary, seasonal, and casual employment–nothing permanent–through our visa expiration in Feb. 2026.
• Where will you live? For our 2-month trek on the TA, we'll be living out of our packs, sleeping in our tent or in one of the many Backcountry huts in New Zealand. Afterwards, we hope to live near Queenstown or Wanaka. We may live at a ski resort where we work, but the resorts with employee housing are limited.

Obviously, we both have a lot of reasons to be excited. We’re feeling very blessed to pursue a trip like this, with so many opportunities to see new places, meet new people, and have our world-views shaken. We are also both acutely conscious of the country we are stepping away from, its laundry-list of chronic issues and the acute rise of fascism and ideological polarization. Many people cannot fly away from these challenges. Some of them are global, and some are local to the place we will return to and call home. As we travel, we will be looking for ways to be part of the solutions to these problems.

If nothing else, this whole thing should prove to be interesting. I’ll be happy to use this blog as an outlet to share our experiences and a forum through which we can engage with family, friends, and anyone else who chooses to read. If you know of someone else who would want to see our updates, feel free to share the link.

Cheers,

Will