Why We Dragged Our Kids to the Bottom of the World

It started, as most big decisions do, with a long conversation and a clear moment when we both knew we were going to stop talking and actually do it.

We had been talking about New Zealand for years. The scenery. The people. The fact that it was about as far from Milwaukee, Wisconsin as a place could physically be. But with three kids, the logistics kept stopping us. The 16-hour flight felt like a wall we would never climb. The cost felt like a negotiation we were not ready to have with ourselves. The jet lag with an eight-year-old felt like something we described as a problem to solve later.

Then we stopped solving it later.

What We Booked

Sixteen days. Mid-March. Chicago to San Francisco to Auckland to Queenstown on Air New Zealand. Two rental cars: one for the South Island, one for the North. Four nights in Queenstown, one night at Mt Cook, four nights in Wanaka, then a flight to Auckland and four nights on the Coromandel Peninsula.

The planning took months. The spreadsheet was substantial. We researched activities, compared accommodations, checked age minimums for jet boats and glacier hikes, and had at least three conversations about whether the flight was actually going to be survivable.

It was.

What We Actually Did

We rode a jet boat through a narrow canyon at high speed. We cruised a fiord under thousand-foot cliffs. We hiked to a glacial lake at the foot of New Zealand’s highest peak. We stood in the dark in a car park in Mt Cook and watched the Milky Way appear, and then watched our twelve-year-old explain constellations to his younger siblings.

We did a luge. Multiple times. Our eight-year-old wanted to keep going until they closed the gondola for the night.

We fished for salmon and ate what we caught. We dug a hot pool on a beach where geothermal water seeps up through the sand at low tide. We drove winding coastal roads through subtropical forest in the dark on the Coromandel and arrived, intact, at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world.

What We Did Not Expect

The people.

We expected spectacular scenery, we got it. We expected good food, we got it. We did not expect the consistent, genuine quality of every single human interaction we had for sixteen days.

New Zealand has a phrase posted on an archway in the Queenstown waterfront: “Service Above Self.” We saw it on day one. We watched it mean something for the rest of the trip. It is not a hospitality training slogan there. It is a description of a culture that actually pays its workers fairly and treats service as something worth doing with dignity.

Our kids noticed. I keep coming back to that.

Was It Worth It?

We spent what a good family trip costs. We lost two days to jet lag on either end. We covered a lot of ground in sixteen days and there were moments where everyone was tired.

It was worth it. Completely and without qualification.

New Zealand is one of the most family-friendly, safe, organized, spectacularly beautiful places on the planet. Everything works. Everyone is kind. The kids are still talking about it.

We are already talking about going back.

This site is everything we wish we had found when we were planning. Use it well.