It is dark. It is 4.30 a.m. The alarm has just gone off. Tom (my 12 yr old grandson) and I are being picked up in Hamilton, by the Road Cat shuttle at 5.20 a.m. to catch the plane to Queenstown from Auckland. The start of our very exciting four day freedom hiking trip of the Routeburn Track.

Checking in was seamless but for some bizarre reason I believed our packs had to be bubble wrapped so for many precious minutes the night before Tom and I had wrapped and sellotaped our big packs, only to be looked at by a very bemused check in person, asking why we had done that!!!!