Great Barrier Island, The Final Frontier

Early in the morning, when the day was dawning... Beckett and I woke up ever so slightly hungover, groggily got our gear together and shuffled into the back of Aida's(My "other mother's") car to be taken to Auckland airport.

In order to beat commuter traffic into the city and get to the airport on time we had to be on the road by about 5 AM.

We arrived at the airport in plenty of time and after saying our thank-yous and goodbyes to Aida and Erica who'd tagged along for the trip, we had a couple of hours to kill before our Barrier flight. We got a quick Mc-breakfast and checked ourselves in at the miniscule check-in desk for FlyMySky airlines, one of two companies that operates flights on and off Great Barrier Island.

The check-in process essentially involved a quick weighing of our stuff to make sure we were within weight limits and paying some excess fees to get some boxes of grocery supplies across to mum. The stores on the island are limited and charge a lot because of the costs involved in getting shipments across, so mum tends to do big shops off island or have people that are coming to visit bring things over.

After a couple of hours we boarded our flight onto a propeller plane with room for about 12 people per flight in seats that resemble bus benches. The flight took the standard 35 minutes because the weather was awesome, and was an absolutely beautiful journey over the Hauraki Gulf.

Upon arrival on The Barrier, mum picked us up from the airport in Claris (one of the several regions of the island) and drove us over to her house in Tryphena (another region of the island) which took about 40 minutes.

I think the most striking thing about the island when you first visit is the massive expanse of untouched land and the lack of people. There's a lot of bush track and beachland that contributes to the 285 square kilometre land area. The official permanent population is listed at just under 1000 people with a boost in numbers over the summer with tourists and holiday home owners coming over.

On our first day, all we really did was catch up with mum, write up a rough draft for the rest of the trip and make a quick visit to Medlands beach for a walk around. Medlands is a massively renowned surfing beach and a lot of people in the summer come over to ride the awesome waves there. It was nice being able to walk along it and experience it in the off season with not so many people around.

I think Beckett was pretty impressed with the sheer natural beauty of The Barrier and of New Zealand in general, I know I definitely was. Before mum moved over there, I had no idea it even existed. I can safely say it's one of the most beautiful parts of New Zealand that I have seen and I've seen most of the country. I highly recommend visiting if you're in New Zealand for any reason at any time. It's well worth working into your trip.

In the next post I'll talk about the rest of our Barrier trip and recommend some of the must-sees and do's of the island because I know you'll be visiting at some point.

St Patrick's Day 2014

Earlier in the year (2014) Beckett, my best friend from Wisconsin, had talked about the possibility of coming out to visit me in New Zealand. I can't imagine what about my country would appeal to a 19 year old Wisconsinite, surely not the R18 drinking age? Definitely not the spectacular scenery and unparalleled beauty of the place. He must just have been missing me a lot.

At any rate, in March he stopped speculating and came over, arriving a couple of days later than originally anticipated on the 17th. That's right, he arrived just in time for St Patrick's Day, the only day of the year where it's socially acceptable to be drunk before lunchtime. He'd been delayed on a couple of flights and had to spend some unexpected time in Australia where he had a small win at a local casino and made fast friends with a few locals in true Beckett style.

I had already drawn up a rough itinerary for us, involving a trip up North to Auckland, over to Great Barrier Island and then back down in mum's car to Wellington sight-seeing along the way but aside from times for needing to be on and off the barrier we had a very loose schedule.

We were booked to fly to Auckland the evening of the 17th so I decided the best thing to do was to drop luggage off at my place and head into town for some quick drinking as soon as Beckett got in. He seemed happy enough with that as the plan and so began our St Patty's Day celebrations.

We hit up a couple of the Irish bars around the Cuba Street area for the traditional dose of Irish stout before it was time to bus home and gear up for Auckland. Beckett decided it was a good idea to match me in pace and number on the drinking front and at this point was keeping up admirably, his college drinking paying dividends.

The plan for the night in Auckland was to stay with family of mine in South Auckland who had generously offered to pick us up from the airport and drive us back there the next morning for our flight over to the Barrier.

Our flight up went smoothly and we were soon greeted by the familiar faces (well familiar to me) of my "other mother" and her youngest daughter who I usually refer to as my sister, who is about 2 years younger than me. Soon after arriving we were roped into her St Patrick's Day plans which involved visiting their local Irish bar and downing even more of the good stuff, an endeavour we were more than happy to involve ourselves with.

Once we were settled in there with Erica (afore-mentioned sister), Emerald (Erica's older sister, also usually referred to as my sister) and some of their friends, we sat drinking Guinness whilst listening to a Celtic band playing in the courtyard and felt just a little bit Irish.

Thankfully we had a designated driver for the night as alcohol was cheap and we managed to score a few free drinks from particularly merry co-patrons. I was definitely feeling it by the end of the night and Beckett kept good pace up until about the last two drinks where he fell behind a little bit so I imagine at the time he was also feeling particularly jolly. He also managed to find himself a female counterpart for our time there so I think he was a little smitten about that as well as our general level of pleasant intoxication.

St Patrick's Day 2014 was really the first time I ever decided to go out and do something for the occasion and that was largely spurred on by playing host to Beckett. It was amazing to have him in the country even if only for a week and in the coming few posts I'll elaborate on the adventure we had whilst he was in town. I don't think we could've packed more into the 9 or so days he was visiting if we'd tried (well maybe if I'd organised some hallucinogenics or something but that's a different train of thought all together).

In the next post I'll talk about our trip to the Barrier, which was my first trip out there to see Mum in her new set-up.

Life Is What Happens To You While You're Busy Making Other Plans

The thing about growing up is that it comes with responsibility. That responsibility often requires a re-alignment of priorities and it is with that in mind that I begin this post.

December feels like an age ago. Most of 2013 seems to have passed me by in a blur of excitement, friendship, heart-break and grand realisations. I guess most years pass by like that though, I'm not yet sure whether that's a mark of youth or if that's life. I'll touch on it again in twenty years time and let you all know. What does stand out about the 2013 that was for me though, is the way in which I chose to spend it and the fact that I was able to choose to spend it. 

2013 was my first full year out of high school. The first year that I was not bound to an educational system and was left to roam freely through the world of adulthood. It was utterly terrifying. In January of 2013 I was not where I wanted to be, I had no idea how to get to where I wanted to be and I was becoming increasingly frustrated with a system that seemed to be geared against anyone without the fortune of a sizeable bank account.

With a few thousand dollars in the bank and an extremely generous offer of help from my father, I decided that my best option was to return to Wisconsin on a visitor visa for 6 months and essentially see what would happen. It was largely an experiment to see whether it was still a place I wanted to be and to enable me to make further plans accordingly. 

Ultimately the experience I had confirmed that the Midwest is my second home and I will always feel that there is a place there for me. It very much confirmed in my mind that New Zealand is a fantastic place to have grown up but that it is a place I feel I must leave. 

In early 2014 I find myself in many of the same predicaments as early 2013 but much better equipped to deal with those predicaments. I also find myself in possession of something integral that I lacked in 2013, a sense of direction as to what I want to do with my life.

I write this post from my bed in Wellington, New Zealand, while sick with a particularly nasty head cold and after a day of battling a migraine. I am extremely grateful to have had this day of rest and the motivation to use some of it to write. This is not where I want to be but it is where I have to be right now in order to end up where I want to be.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. A few months ago, I had planned to freeze my ass off in a cold Wisconsin winter while attending Madison Media Institute, studying towards an Associate Degree in Video and Motion Graphics. Currently I find myself working as a construction labourer in the city I grew up in, saving towards my dream. I am 20 years old, if there's one thing I do have in abundance, it's time for dream-chasing. 

In the mean time I'll keep my rituals which keep me sane (a few beers in town with friends on thursdays, $2 towards gambling on fridays, sleep half the day away on saturdays), keep doing the things I love (writing, making music, making youtube videos, performing) and keep working towards my dream. There are a lot of things in my life that I can't control but if I keep doing these things, the one thing I can count on is that I'll stay upbeat and that's all that really matters in life anyways, following your heart and keeping a smile on your face.

I'll leave you all with a quote that resonates deeply within me and has for as long as I can remember, "I'm far from what I once was but not yet what I am going to be."

Thanksgiving

I know it's a few days overdue but here's my first ever Thanksgiving post in honour of one the best holidays I've ever heard of.

Brief Politically Incorrect History Lesson: Thanksgiving is a North American tradition which takes place on the 3rd Thursday in November every year (in the US at least) during which time people gather with family to consume copious amounts of food and remind themselves what it is in their lives that they are grateful for. This is supposedly modeled after a meal the first English pilgrims had with the native Americans before murdering them and stealing most of their homeland for their own but we wont go too far into that right now.
End of Lesson.

I spent my Thanksgiving with a group of people I consider to be family and enjoyed a delicious meal consisting mostly of mashed potatoes and turkey on my part while watching the worst Green Bay Packers game I have yet witnessed in my 3 seasons as a fan. It was a wonderful occasion all around.

Now that I have the formalities covered it's time for what I really came here to write about today. So what am I thankful for? I think a better question would be: what am I not thankful for?

I am thankful for all of my friends and family (both blood and honorary). I am thankful for everyone whose life I have made an impact on and for everyone who has ever made an impact on mine. I am thankful for everything that has brought me to where I am today and for everything that is yet to happen to me to carry me through to the next great adventure in my life. I am thankful for my ability to think, write and play music, things which have been critical to my life so far and that I hope will continue to be at the core of my existence. I am thankful for things as they were, things as they are and things as they will be. These are the things that I am thankful for and while thanksgiving reminds me to consciously say thank you for them, these are the things I am grateful for every day. These are the things that pull me out of bed every morning and push me in the direction of my dreams.

I love Thanksgiving because it reminds us of who we really are, the great things we have in our lives, and the great people we are blessed to be able to share in the lives of. The sad side of Thanksgiving is that like every other holiday, its meaning tends to get lost in the acts of overeating and worrying about the Christmas season. While I'm not one to push religion upon anyone I do believe that the greatest good that comes from organised religion is that through prayer it reminds us to say thank you and appreciate what we have.

As we head into December and Christmas approaches I hope that we all remember in all of the hustle and bustle to say thank you for what we have and enjoy the holiday season with our families instead of trampling each other in Black Friday sales or stressing about money issues.

Don't just let Thanksgiving pass you by, make every day thanksgiving and remember the positives in your life. There are many, and they always outweigh the negatives...always!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

On Turning 20

On October 12, 1993, a child was born in the city of Palmerston North, New Zealand. Some 20 years later, that same child sits at a computer keyboard, updating his blog and reflecting upon two decades of life on this crazy planet.

It's hard not to get emotional thinking that my teen years are over and realising that the next 10 years of my life are going to pretty much be whatever I choose to make of them. I'd be lying if I said that there weren't times in my life where I questioned whether I'd even make it this far but here I am, 20 years old, where I want to be, pursuing what I love.

I don't feel much different in any particular respect having hit the end of my 2nd decade of life. Nothing much has changed yet; I still eat breakfast far less often than I probably should, I still put my pants on one leg at a time and I still have a lot of things I'm trying to figure out.

I guess the biggest difference is my outlook on things to come. Everyone has a hard time growing up. It's awkward learning things by trial and error, there are some things we have to experience multiple times to get the lesson out of it and it sucks having to deal with that while going through dramatic physical and emotional developmental changes.

As a no-longer-teen-ager I feel like I am better equipped to deal with the lessons life throws at me. I don't have as much of the blind teen angst any more. I don't have the stress of learning to juggle sports, school and band schedules. I've been through enough interpersonal relationships to have a fair idea of how to treat someone, how I should be treated and what to do when things aren't right.That said, I make no claim to having everything figured out. I just think that I have a much better set of coping strategies for when things do go to shit than I had at 13 or 15 or even 18.

I'm hopeful that my 20s will be my best decade yet and that when I write my "On Turning 30" post in ten years I'll have a much bigger readership and a long list of accomplishments to reflect on. Who knows, by then maybe my children will be reading this, wondering what their crazy father is on about because they'll be too young to have any kind of perspective on any of this stuff yet. I'd be okay with that.

For now, I'm young enough to have my whole life ahead of me and old enough to do something about it. Here's to living outside the comfort zone, taking giant leaps of faith and looking back with a smile. I'm proud of who I am, I'm proud of how I got to being who I am and I wouldn't trade the last 20 years of my life for anything. May the crazy ride continue.

Photo by Will Myers on Unsplash

Back From Unofficial Hiatus

So it's confession time for me.

Are you ready for it?

Are you sure?

Okay, well here it comes...

I haven't written for a very long time. If I had to offer a rough guess, I'd say I probably haven't written a post here in 5 months. If you really want, you can check that for me and let me know how accurate my brain's in-built concept of time is. There's a reason that I haven't written in so long and it is this: I very seriously considered killing this blog.

Initially, I created this as a way to document my adventures and experiences as an exchange student and in the year that followed my exchange. The intention there came in three parts. I wanted to create a collection of my own thoughts and experiences for my own future reference and so that I could have a hope of showing anyone might have wondered, a glimmer of what being an exchange student was, is and continues to be for me. Secondly, I wanted to provide somewhat of a resource for other exchangers in the hope that through reading about me, they might be better equipped to cope with their own roller coaster experiences or at least feel a little less alone. Also, and this is probably the weakest of my three major motives, I wanted my friends and family to be able to keep in touch with what I was doing when I lacked the time or inclination to communicate with them regularly.

Today, as I write my first new NZ Blackhawk blog post in 5-ish months, I do so for two reasons. I am no longer an active exchange student, in so far as I completed my exchange and survived the re-assimilation process into New Zealand culture and life. As such I do not write this blog any more for the benefit of other exchange students. I write this to keep anyone who is interested in knowing what I'm up to in the loop. I write this also because I'm now at an incredibly exciting time in my life and I want to remember as much as I can as vividly as possible.

With that said, I'm going to use the rest of this post to go through some significant events of the last few months and hopefully get you caught up on exactly where I'm at.

In June, I had the wonderful experience of traveling to Washington DC with my best friend Beckett. We made somewhat of a road-trip out of it and over 4 or 5 days we made it to and from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin to DC with the main focus of the trip being to watch a football (soccer) game between the USA and Germany.

Along the way we visited National Mall, became well acquainted with the DC metro system and found an interesting little cigar shop somewhere near Chinatown. We also made an unexpected and never to be repeated trip into Gary, Indiana and later accidentally drove to Michigan. I had the presence of mind to take a camera with us and documented parts of the trip over a 3 video series which you can watch here:

In early July I also had the good fortune of being able to venture away from Wisconsin with another trip to Copper Harbor, this time to celebrate the 4th of July. During that trip, I got to experience Copper Harbor at the height of its busy season, full of tourons (what the locals call the tourists). For such a tiny town they put on a stunning fireworks display, very nearly on as grand a scale as the Guy Fawkes show put on by the city of Wellington every year (Wellington is bigger than Madison while Copper Harbor has somewhere around 50 permanent residents).

Aside from those two trips, I was introduced quite by accident to an interesting school here. It's a Media school with a really cool video and motion graphics programme. In one visit it got me excited and energised enough to apply for a change of status in order to attend. So as soon as the USCIS approves my change of status request (which I filed on August 27) I'll be attending school at Madison Media Institute studying towards an Associate's Degree in Video and Motion Graphics. I'm excited to study videography and learn more about the technical side of film and video production.

That covers the main plot points of the last 5 months of my life and concludes the return from an unannounced and unintended hiatus from blogging. I shall endeavor to write a new post somewhere in between bi-monthly and monthly from this point on.

Photo by MILKOVÍ on Unsplash

Return To Wisconsin

After somewhere between 10 and 11 of the hardest months of my life, I decided that my best option was to return to Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin to visit all of the people and things I've missed so much since last June. As a result of this decision, I scheduled an appointment with the US consulate in order to obtain a 6 month visitor visa, booked flights from Auckland through to Chicago via San Francisco and skipped the country I've come to loathe.

I've been back in Fort for a little over a month now and the experience so far has been a mixed bag. It's fantastic seeing everyone again and being able to hang out with the friends I'd been missing so much but I've been horrendously busy virtually since I touched down. I've barely had time to touch base with New Zealand, as far as I can gather they're not falling apart without me.

I've been roped into playing guitar for the showchoir band for the end of year jazz di pasta show that they perform in which involves me being at the high school every day and before that I was singing with the chamber choir because they're low on men this year. I also helped out behind the scenes as a crew member for this years spring play which was "Noises Off." My ex-girlfriend was one of the stage managers and things between us have been pretty volatile since I've been back so that was an interesting one.

Right now I'm helping Kathy Ihde (who was my AFS liasion person) move into her home for the next 6 months in Copper Harbor, Michigan. We came up earlier this week (7 and a half hour drive) with a packed car and trailer full of things to make her new house more accomodating. It's awesome being right by a different part of Lake Superior and seeing the UP (Upper Peninsula) for the first time ever. I'll be staying with her husband Jeff for the remainder of my time here while she lives and works up in Copper Harbor.

I've been doing a little bit of creative writing recently but not as much as I'd like to be so I'm hoping to make time for that in coming weeks. I'm also hoping to keep my youtube channel going with fresh videos on a regular (hoping for weekly) basis, I just went up to 50 subscribers this week so I'm pretty excited about that venture. I've got a trip to DC planned in a couple of weeks with my best friend Beckett to see the US play Germany in a soccer match which I'm looking forward to.

I definitely made the right call with coming back to Wisconsin when I did. Things in New Zealand were going nowhere for me and I was getting more and more frustrated with my situation. This trip has restored a lot of my ambition and life goals that I was ready to give up on and I'm excited to see what happens in the next few months.