"You may as well just take the chemist with you..."

We're approaching the one week countdown for take off. For me at least, it's not quite sinking in. There's just a few little things left to get sorted, cash currently being the most pressing one. And travel insurance, which I thought might have been fixed by now...

We also have the issue of packing. Well, I say we. Claire and Amy seem to have more concerns about this. I was just going to sling everything I need into a bag and be done with it. Y'know, clothes, toiletries, my old bear Marmalade who goes on every holiday even though I'm almost (oh god) in my mid-twenties... Apparently it's not that simple, because there's an assortment of other things that we might need and we need to work out who's taking what.

First aid kit and various medications would be one. Anyone would think New Zealand didn't have plasters and paracetamol. I am told we should take these with us. Plasters, fair enough - I always take them with me because I'm an idiot and I injure myself on stupid things like dead trees (see this post from Australia). But apparently we also need to take paracetamol and imodium and all sorts of other little things. Seriously, we might as well just take the pharmacists with us.

Anyways, that rant aside... what else is happening? Much route mapping. I don't trust sat-navs, so I've let Google work out all the possible directions we could need and printed them off so I can laugh when the sat-nav goes wrong. Which it probably won't but after that time a friend's tried to send us through a very deep ford... yeah.

I need to start making a New Zealand playlist in preparation for the flight. Well, I need something to keep me sane. It will involve lots of Lord of the Rings soundtrack and probably some Crowded House because we discovered they're pretty much the only New Zealand band we've heard of.