How I Found my Great Grandfather's Love Letters in New Zealand

Husband and I needed a break from work and life. I was scheduled to finish school and then we would be FREE. Our trip starts with the fact that Husband has friends who have their own grandchildren. He served with a couple in Russia and they have remained friends.  Although husband is significantly younger, they still manage to think he is cool enough to spend time with him. The couple had invited Husband in 2009 to visit on their yearly winter vacation to New Zealand. We couldn't get away at the time but he promised to go the next year. A free place to stay in New Zealand? Yes, thank you! We didn't know anything about NZ except what we learned from Flight of the Conchords.

We flew on New Zealand Air which was great. I wasn't excited about sitting in the back of a plane for 13 hours, but then we sat down and they played the world's BEST plane safety video. And from that point we knew this was going to be a good trip.

"Disco Inspired Safety Video" (hello and welcome to the most chill country in the world)

We wanted to stay in New Zealand as long as we could, so we were traveling as cheap as possible. We got our car from "Rent-a-dent" which, true to it's name, is a pretty sad looking car. But seriously cheap, and that's what mattered.  I'm not quite old enough to drive a rental car, so Husband was stuck driving. This wouldn't be a problem except that Husband has slowly given the job of driving over to me, so he hadn't driven long distances in a while and he hadn't driven a stick sift since high school. And now we have to drive on the opposite side of the road. We flew into Auckland landed around 6 AM and we needed to get down to Hamilton about 2 hours South.  We were tired and it was tough because you instinctively want to turn in the wrong lanes, and at one of the first roundabouts, Husband drove in the wrong direction. Immediately I start freaking out and yelling - which wasn't helping. The problem is, there isn't an easy way out once you go in the wrong direction because all of the curbs are facing away. So we did the only logical thing we could think of and put the car in reverse and backed out of the roundabout. Yeah, that happened.

Hamilton is more or less in the middle of the island. It is lots of rolling hills and sheep. Here is a shot we took at sunset just a couple minutes from where we were staying:

Rangi and some of her collection. Photo by John Hart

Probably our favorite part of the trip was meeting the people. We were staying with friends by the LDS temple in a little suburb of Hamilton, rightfully called Temple View. Our friends had "set up camp" in some old dormitories of the school. In the 50s the temple and the school were built by volunteers. And just a few years ago the school had shut down. Th buildings were being disputed whether they would  be demolished soon. so there wasn't much there except cement walls, old springily beds, and communal bathrooms. They had borrowed some furniture and couple dishes and had happily settled in for the winter to enjoy the weather and spend time working with a woman named Rangi Parker.

The Maori people have a fascinating history. They believe that people first came to New Zealand on 7 canoes that landed in all different regions of the islands. They have an strong oral history and the patriarchs can recite their heritage back to their original canoe. It is a beautiful chant-like song spoken in the Maori language. Well this history was slowly disappearing with time and so Rangi Parker took it upon herself to restore and preserve this culture.  You can check out the article on Rangi from the Ensign here) She started recording the language, interviewing those who remembered, and collecting every document she could. She especially took the time to find and record all of the LDS missionaries who came to New Zealand. Eventually she took over one of the old school buildings and transformed it into a museum full of photos and videos (most videos she made herself), and just piles upon piles of information. She is an amazing woman and I could go on and on about all of the fascinating things she has done. But what was really amazing was that my Great Grandfather Layfayette Holbrook had served a mission in New Zealand from 1897-1900. We started searching and we found pictures, stories and love letters back and forth from my great grandfather to my great grandmother. How crazy is that? I traveled across the world to find out more about my own grandfather who had done the same nearly 120 years before me.

Rangi has a beautiful atmosphere of life around her. Every thing she talks about is with a exciting and vibrant atmosphere. She was always telling is this person, or that experiences was AMAZING. And she would say "amazing" in her great New Zealand accent very slowly and open up her eyes wide and excited. We immediately picked up on her coined phrase.

We found the best way to get around is to just jump in the car and take off in a direction. There are a million little Bed and Breakfasts places, mostly people with extra rooms and a sign out front. (Note- none of our B&Bs actually served breakfast?!) It is VERY nerve racking to me to not know where we are going to sleep at night, but Husband was very relaxed about the whole thing. He had a lot of faith that we would find somewhere to sleep. We had spent the night before at a beach where a bunch of debris had washed up, and they weren't letting anyone get in the water. We needed to get further up the coasts to actually enjoy the beach.

A shot from Cathedral Cove

It didn't look far so we started driving up to the East side of the Island, looking for the infamous "Cathedral Cove".  It took us ALL day driving and by the end Husband was pretty frazzled from the narrow mountain roads. We pulled into a tiny little beach town and found the one restaurant and sat by the beach eating fish and chips. By around 5 pm we decided to look for a place to stay. Every door I knocked on was full. I started trying to calculate how long it would take to drive back to the next town. 3 hours? After about the 5th door, we drove to the end of the city limits and found a place. We could usually find something around 100 NZ dollars, the conversion to USD was around $70-ish, not too bad,  We ended up staying at this remote beach town for an extra day because it was so beautiful. It was one of our better finds.

It wasn't your typical vacation but our New Zealand trip was amazing.

Everywhere we went, we took our camera and grabbed a couple shots when we had time. I cut together a video last month of the footage for fun: