Shawn & Scott’s New Zealand Blog
Experiencing New ZealandArchive for January, 2008
19,075 miles & 40 hours and 57 minutes
Shawn and I will be spending 9 days on the South Island of New Zealand (Queenstown and Christchurch) and 5 days on the North Island (Auckland).
Departure to New Zealand:Baltimore, MD – Queenstown, New Zealand
Leave: 11:34 am on Thursday, February 7th
Arrive: 11:50 am on Saturday, February 9th
Total plane time: 21 hours 14 minutes
Total miles traveled: 9,516
Arrival to US: Auckland, New Zealand – Baltimore, MD
Leave: 7:15 pm on Saturday, February 23rd
Arrive: 11:43 pm on Saturday, February 23rd.
Total plane time: 17 hours and 38 minutes
Total miles traveled: 8,879
Cheers,Scott
Pitfalls of Traveling into the Future
My only real concern with traveling to New Zealand is jet lag. Shawn and I will be spending the better part of an entire day on a plane, and after flying for nearly 24 hours the last thing I want to do is sleep the day away when we arrive in Queenstown on Saturday afternoon. I have polled friends and colleagues with questions surrounding the best way to avoid jet lag and have come up with a variety of answers. The most interesting and healthy suggestions were to ‘tough it out’ and adopt the New Zealand time by refusing to sleep until the evening of our arrival day or to take an all-natural supplement called Melatonin.
Melatonin is a hormone naturally produced in the pineal gland of the brain, which helps in sleep regulation and managing your body’s natural sleep schedule. I have researched Melatonin to make sure it’s not one of those crazy sleep aids that get people immediately addicted.
Here’s what NIH (National Institutes of Health) has to say about it:
“Based on available studies and clinical use, melatonin is generally regarded as safe in recommended doses for short-term use. Available trials report that overall adverse effects are not significantly more common with melatonin than placebo.” (U.S. National Institutes of Health) Cited from http://www.melatonin.com/melatonin-faq-general.php
If anyone has any experience with Melatonin, please comment and let me know what you think.
First timer
Hello! This is my very first blog, so please bear with me as I explore the minutia of what these popular on-line journals have to offer. It is a bit embarrassing to admit that I have never blogged before, especially since it is such a highly sought after attribute in the field that I work in (IT Services / Software Engineering).
My experience with blogs began with friends traveling abroad for long periods of time and coworkers blogging on all types of industry specific ideas and knowledge management.
The purpose of this blog will be for Shawn and me to share stories, experiences, pictures, and pretty much whatever motivates us to write about. Another great benefit that this blog will (hopefully) bring is detailed accuracy on experiences in New Zealand and everything surrounding it. I can testify that my recollection of the details is average at best, so it is my goal to provide details of our 2 weeks in New Zealand so that everyone can follow while we are away.
Here is a little background…
Shawn was gracious enough to invite me to go to New Zealand with him about a month ago and the planning has just begun. Before beginning to research for this trip, I knew the bare minimum about New Zealand: NZ is an island a far plane ride away, they have a rugby team named the All Blacks, they drive on the opposite side of the road, they love extreme activities/sports, and there always seems to be a reference to Kiwi when speaking about NZ (I would later find out that the Kiwi is the national symbol of NZ).
Our flights got booked today and despite knowing the flight was going to be long, I was still amazed at the time difference between departure from Baltimore (BWI) at 11:34 AM on Thursday, February 7th and the arrival in Queenstown, NZ at 11:50 AM on Saturday, February 9th. Taking only the dates and times into account, that’s over48 hours; however we lose a day traveling to NZ because we are on a plane for 21 hours and 9 minutes AND we cross the International Date Line. Traveling the way home is even more interesting because we leave Auckland, NZ on Saturday (23rd) at 7:15 PM and arrive in Baltimore at 11:45 PM on the same day.
That is all that we have set for now; however all suggestions on places to visit or comments to make regarding the information that we write about are welcome.
(Next blog: Activity planning phase 1, rugby match)
