Our New Zealand Roadtrip

December 2024 – January 2025

During our 10-week winter travels in 2024-25, we dedicated four weeks to exploring New Zealand. This marked my fourth trip to the country and our second visit with the girls. For this journey, we chose to concentrate primarily on the South Island, allocating just one week to the North Island. That week was reserved for reconnecting with the family I stayed with when I was 16 and attending school in New Zealand, as well as for finally making Jonathan’s dream of hiking the Tongariro Crossing a reality.

This time, we decided to rent a motorhome—a completely new way for me to experience New Zealand, even though it’s a very popular choice for travelers here, and for good reason. New Zealand truly invites you to get out and explore, and what you explore is its breathtaking nature – what better way to do this than in a motorhome? There are, of course, many ways to do this. On our previous visit, we rented a car and stayed in a mix of hotels, Airbnb apartments, camping huts, and borrowed summerhouses. That approach worked great for us and is how we’ve typically traveled. However, when you travel like that—staying only a night or two in each place—there’s a lot of packing, unpacking, checking in and out, and constantly settling into new accommodations. While we had a cooler bag to carry food between destinations when travelling in the car, traveling in a campervan made things so much easier. With our kitchen always with us, we could prepare meals anytime, anywhere. It’s a much more seamless way to explore the country.

In New Zealand, you have the option to enjoy freedom camping when traveling in a certified self-contained motorhome (more on what this means below). This was a choice we embraced often during our visit, balancing it with stays at a variety of campgrounds. Our journey included a delightful mix of modern campsites with full amenities—sometimes even luxurious extras like hot tubs—more basic campgrounds, and serene freedom camping spots. This allowed us to experience the best of both worlds: some days indulging in hot showers, playgrounds, bouncing pillows, and spacious kitchens, and other days soaking in the solitude of breathtaking natural settings, relying solely on what we carried in our motorhome.

Enough about the various accommodation options and their pros and cons—perhaps I’ll dive deeper into that topic in a separate post in the future. For now, let’s shift focus to the itinerary I’ve outlined below, broken down into one-week segments. If you’re curious about how I planned this trip and pieced together the itinerary, feel free to check out my blog post here: First Stop New Zealand – The Adventure Takes Shape.

Below, you’ll find an overview of a possible four-week itinerary for exploring New Zealand. If you’d like more detailed insights from our journey, you can follow the links to the daily journal entries from our trip. (These are still being updated but will be available in the coming weeks!)…