We Asked Each Kid for Their Honest Trip Highlights. Here's What They Said.
Our twelve-year-old had one answer. The ten-year-old had six. Our eight-year-old's top pick cost three dollars and involved a spade. A family debrief of sixteen days in New Zealand.
Three weeks after we got home, we sat down at the kitchen table and asked each kid one question: What was your favorite part?
The answers were illuminating. They were also completely different from what we predicted.
Our 12-Year-Old
His answer: The stargazing at Mt Cook.
No hesitation. No deliberation. Just that.
Our twelve-year-old spends a lot of energy trying to appear unimpressed by things. He deployed this skillfully throughout the trip: maintaining a composed reaction to the Shotover Jet, a measured response to Milford Sound, a polite acknowledgment of Wanaka’s Rob Roy Glacier Track that suggested he was enjoying himself while technically not admitting to it.
The stargazing broke him. He forgot to be twelve about it.
He knows astronomy. He has studied it. He can name things. Standing in the dark at an International Dark Sky Reserve at the foot of New Zealand’s highest mountain and seeing those things in the actual sky, that landed differently than a textbook. He stood there for over an hour and talked to his younger siblings about what they were looking at. Unprompted, unselfconsciously, just talking because it meant something.
That is the version of this trip we will remember in twenty years.
Our 10-Year-Old
His answer: Everything. But specifically, the Shotover Jet, the luge, the Rob Roy Glacier Track, Puzzle World, Hot Water Beach, and “the boat with the coal.”
Our ten-year-old experiences enthusiasm as a state of being. He brought the same energy to the jet boat as he did to the spade at Hot Water Beach as he did to the moving optical illusion room at Puzzle World. Everything received his full commitment.
If you pushed him, and we did, the Shotover Jet was the top. Thirty minutes of high-speed boat through a canyon barely wider than the vessel itself, with a driver who performed 360-degree spins and made it look like an afterthought. He came off the boat grinning in the particular way that means he is trying to figure out how to do it again.
Second place went to the luge, which he would have ridden until the gondola stopped running for the night if we had allowed it. We did not fully allow it, but we came close.
Our 8-Year-Old
Her answer: Hot Water Beach. And also the Waterworks.
She thought about it for a long time. She mentioned the luge. She mentioned the Earnslaw steamboat. She mentioned Rob Roy because she was proud of finishing the track and wanted credit for it, which she deserved. Then she settled.
Hot Water Beach first. The Waterworks second.
Hot Water Beach because she burned her foot slightly in the first thirty seconds by stepping directly on the vent before we had mixed in cold water, a rite of passage she now describes as a founding event, and spent the next hour managing her pool temperature with complete authority while the rest of us did whatever she said.
The Waterworks because it is genuinely brilliant. A water-powered art installation and playground on the 309 Road in the Coromandel that is simultaneously an engineering museum, an outdoor playground, and a piece of eccentric New Zealand art. Every contraption does something. Every child immediately starts experimenting. Our eight-year-old tried every single one and then went back to her favorites.
She called it her favorite thing of the trip at dinner that night. She still calls it that.
What We Think Now
We were right that New Zealand would be spectacular. We were not entirely right about what would be spectacular.
We planned for Milford Sound to be the centerpiece. It was extraordinary: the Fly-Cruise-Fly in through the mountains, the fiord walls, the waterfalls. We still talk about it. But it is not anyone’s top answer.
The top answers are a dark sky in a car park. A chaos of luge runs on a mountain above a lake. A three-dollar spade on a beach in the Coromandel.
Lesson: bring your kids to remarkable places, plan carefully, spend thoughtfully. Then let go of which part they will love most.
They will tell you, eventually. Usually at the kitchen table, three weeks later.
What We Loved
The moments between activities. The Rob Roy Glacier Track on a Tuesday morning with nobody else on the trail. The salmon fishing dinner in Wanaka when our twelve-year-old spent an hour being coached by the owner before picking up a rod. The archway in Queenstown that said “Service Above Self” and then meant it for sixteen days straight.
Also Milford Sound. We get to love Milford Sound. We are the adults.