Why New Zealand

Over the past few years, since we've been married, Michelle and I have been talking about moving out west; Washington, Oregon, Colorado etc... As many of you know, Michelle spent a semester in New Zealand traveling the country and studying. I spent two weeks over there and loved every minute of it.

As Michelle and I were talking about moving out west, one of us mentioned New Zealand. This was more of a joke or a dream. We never thought that we were actually going to do it, but we entertained the idea. We looked into jobs and the requirements we would need to continue our careers there, but we weren't sure where in NZ we would like to live. The country, although small, has many different environments and locations that interested us. We wanted to be able to travel everywhere freely, and knew that full-time careers would tie us down to one location. Should we scrap this idea and continue our search out west or was there a way for us to live in NZ and travel the country?  One day Michelle stumbled upon a website that offered exactly the opportunity we've been looking for. We can get what's called a working holiday visa, which allows us to work in NZ for up to 12 months. We can also set up short-term jobs and sleeping arrangements anywhere we would like. After a few weeks of serious consideration we decided to go for it. Why not? If we don't do this now, we may never be able to do it. And the truth is, we wouldn't be able to do this without Michelle's parents. They have been kind enough to let us stay at their lake cottage for the last few years, where we have been able to save enough money to make our dream a reality.
We applied and received our working holiday visa. This was extremely exciting, but we knew that our NZ trip wasn't official until we bought our plane tickets. Michelle mentions that Fiji is on the way to NZ. If we are going all the way over to NZ, why not stop at Fiji too? I'm sold on the idea immediately. We start looking up planes tickets and had no intention of buying them, but we wanted to get an idea of what they were. A few hours later her and I are sitting on the couch and celebrating with a glass of wine. WOW! What the heck are we getting ourselves into? There's no turning back now. We are leaving for Fiji and New Zealand on October 2, 2012.