Hey everyone welcome to Covid’ed Ocean View

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the world has a new pandemic – Covid-19. This pandemic is what has us, the Najms, staying in New Zealand for an extended amount of time. I’ve never written a blog before or even been present on social media so this is all new to me. But… as of Wednesday 11:59pm March 25th 2020 New Zealand is officially at level 4 alert. That means full lockdown for everyone and everything except what is deemed essential. (see https://covid19.govt.nz for the NZ covid-19 info). Since this means that we are now housebound I have some free time to learn how to blog. So here we are….

This photo was taken several years ago but you get the idea. The Najms…

I will start from the beginning since we have a little time. Right, we are a family of 4 from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We have a pet gecko named Sandy not by choice. The neighbour’s kid moved away to university and never came back. Anyway, we have a house in the burbs and hang out in the mountains on the weekends. The kids and I are bilingual – English and French. The hubby is not. We love to eat, drink and travel. That about sums us up.

We decided a few years ago – 3 to be precise – that we were going to take a 5 week vacation over the pond to New Zealand (NZ) and Australia (OZ). It took us a year to decide when and then 2 more to save and plan. Since vacation days in Canada don’t just magically appear, we had to start banking days for this trip asap. Also $ doesn’t grow on trees… so we started saving $. Now fast forward to October 2019. We booked the actual flight tickets and started the detail planning. We have very good friends in both countries and I have some family over in OZ. A few calls and some texts back and forth got the trip itinerary in good shape.

Now fast forward again, this time to March 2020. We are scheduled to leave March 3rd arriving March 5th in Auckland. We are so excited to get over to see our good friends. They are the Kiwi, M, Curly Fries and Tenacious C. They used to live in Canada but one of them is originally from NZ (I’ll let you guess which one) so they eventually moved back here. And we were finally coming over to visit them.

The day we left Calgary the corona virus was not yet daily headline news. We knew about it and we understood it was something serious in China but hadn’t really understood that is was about to be something very serious for the whole world. We hopped on the plane heading halfway across the world.

We arrived in Auckland about 11am. We got through the border fairly quickly and headed out to the arrivals area to see our friends waiting for us. What a great surprise! Of course Madame M had a few additional surprises to welcome us. Everyone got a tiki on a beaded necklace to wear. But because M and I share a similar sense of humour she had something extra special made for me.

As you can see, she made me a NZ tour shirt for our trip complete with a painted sash and fascinator. On the backside of the t-shirt, she added all the dates and places we were headed to over the next couple of weeks. Why Busty Bubbles you ask. Well…. since this was going to be a road trip, I thought we should have walkie talkies to make it easier to chat between vehicles. And since we were going to use walkie talkies, naturally, we needed handles. I like bubbles (aka champagne) a lot and I’m busty so really it was a no brainer. Busty Bubbles (BB) was born. M chose Margie Margarita. She isn’t a Marge but it went well with margarita. Hence Margie Margarita and Busty Bubbles NZ Tour 2020.

Once we finished making a scene at the airport, we headed to “their” place. “Their” place is right on the water. Holy crap… what a view. The cover of the blog is the view during the day. This was taken at dusk the night we arrived.

Tomorrow is to be a day out on the boat. I’ll post that story soon.