The Great Photo Escape: New Zealand Part 1

It’s hard to believe I was in New Zealand with the Great Photo Escape 2 weeks ago!! 3 destinations, 40+ hours in the air, 20+ hours of driving… it was the trip of a lifetime & I’m so excited to start recapping the adventures on the blog!!!

I started off my trip with a flight to LA with Hope! We met up with Natalie, Tyler & Ashley & spent a 1/2 day at the airport before our flight left for NZ. Natalie, Hope & I sat together during the 12 hour flight and filled it with giggles, compression socks, movies and sleep!

We left LA at 7:40pm on 1/11 and landed in Auckland, NZ at 5:30am 1/13. We literally skipped 1/12!!! SO crazy!! We tried to sleep as much as we could on the flight so that when we landed we were ready for our day! Our group of 5 was the first group to arrive, so we grabbed breakfast, settled into our Airbnb with Caitlin, and went off to explore the city before the second group arrived! I won’t lie, I was TIRED and GRUMPY!!! But staying up until 9pm helped me to get the BEST night’s sleep & really acclimate myself with the time zone change!

The next day we drove over to Piha Beach for the styled shoot. I visited the flower market with a few girls that morning, and took a bucket of blooms along for the drive. Visiting this black sand beach was AMAZING and I am so happy we made the drive!!!! We spent the day exploring the caves, reading on the beach & watching the Herrinton’s drone get some amazing footage! Later in the day we had our first styled shoot of the trip: an elopement on the beach! It was incredible & I can’t wait to share the images in a later post!!

Day 5 may be one of my favorite days of the trip. It was a free day but almost everyone decided to do that same thing: visit Waiheke Island! I LOVED this island!!! I had no idea what to expect because no one in our group had ever visited before. It was incredible to go into it with no expectations and leave knowing it would be one of my favorite days! We took the ferry over and then a group of us decided to rent a van for the day so we could drive all over the island and not have to use the bus route. It was really inexpensive to rent for the day, and I’m SO glad we did!!!! I literally had tears in my eyes as I took in the beauty of this island; one minute it would feel like a caribbean oasis, the next it was a vast farmland and then it was a tropical rainforest! It was AMAZING!!!!