But even coming up with that most casual plan brought home what a surprising amount of New Zealand I had never seen. And as someone who has done all the camping she intends to do in this lifetime - there's so much more weather than you realise out there and the world is full of things that want to bite you when you sleep - travelling by campervan let me get away from it all, yet take it all with me.
Our campervan, a 2.4L Toyota two-berther, the "Queenie" model (named after Queenstown) from ExploreMore, had a fridge and a gas hob, meaning cold wine and hot coffee were on tap. I also shamelessly added my own home comforts, including a coffee grinder, several feather pillows and a set of cheese knives.
I was almost embarrassed by my interpretation of roughing it when we left Auckland, but at our first stop we pulled up next to a couple who had fitted out their own camper with solar power, a plasma TV, an espresso machine and a built-in kitchen.
Our neighbours had done a tour of the South Island for nine weeks last year and didn't "plug in" (camper talk for stopping at a powered site) once, they told us proudly. "Nine weeks?", I said, surprised, still believing that New Zealand could be seen in a week or so. "We just go down every road we see," she said.
Stop the presses: New Zealand is actually quite big. It took most of a day to drive from Auckland to Ohiwa Family Holiday Park, just west of Opotiki and the start of the road around the North Island's East Cape.
Beautiful, rural and remote, the East Cape is surely one of New Zealand's last frontiers. All uninhabited beaches fringed with pohutukawa in bloom, it felt both utterly charming and, at times, dangerously untamed.
We stopped at the Te Puia Springs shops for a drink. A boy of about 10 was ahead of us in the queue.
"I got a letter from my nan today," he told the woman behind the counter.
"I heard about that already," she said. We ask for a cappuccino.
"I can't do cappuccino," she replied cheerily, "But I can make youse a coffee myself."
My heart ached with the unspoiled idyll and small townness of it all. But on the way out I saw a small notice in the window.
"To the lazy arseholes who keep robbing our shop ...", it began. That night we heard gunfire from hunters.
We stopped for our second night at the unbearably charming Te Araroa Holiday Park and parked up under a tree within cooee of yet another deserted beach. There's a sign at the park advertising the eastern-most cinema in the world, but the manager told us it had closed down. The building is now a gym for locals to practise Zumba, she said.
On her recommendation, we got up at 4.30am and climbed 700-plus steps to the East Cape lighthouse, with its amazing views out over the coast and across the Raukumara Range. When the sun crested over the ocean's lip, we were the first people in the world to see the new day dawn. Even the dozen or so European tourists there taking photos couldn't entirely kill the romance of the moment.
By 6.30am we were making coffee on our camper stove beside the sea - and a school where the instructions on the jungle gym read: "Children's playground. No horses."
Around the coast to Tolaga Bay, our last stop on the cape. We'd intended to spend three nights there, but only managed one (the campsite was full of children and people frowned at me when I drank wine before lunch).
My itinerary, with its wildly over-ambitious travel times, was in pieces by then anyway, so we ended up stopping that night at Tutira Country Park about 40km north of Napier. It's a DOC campsite, so you don't need to book, and the two camping sites (one just besides the road and one about 1km further around the lake) are right on the water. There might have been 20 or so groups there, but they were so spread out we could have been there on our own.
One family - David, Tracy and their 16-year-old son William - were travelling from Kerikeri down to Stewart Island over five weeks. They had nestled their camp under a willow so close to the water's edge that I was momentarily concerned that lakes might have tides.
We shared Christmas cake with them and planned to take photos of the sunrise together. But by the time we got up the next day, David, Tracy and William had already left (even though we woke early as sheep were driven past our van by barking dogs - the campsite is on a working farm and you cannot stay during August and September because of lambing).
So we didn't try and photograph the sunrise, we just swam in the lake with swans, which sounds far more idyllic than it was and involved more swan poo than I expected.
We pressed on through Martinborough - all verandas, clapboards and boutique wineries - out to Cape Palliser to see the seals at Ngaiwi and down to Wellington - the colossal squid was a major disappointment to me; I thought it would be bigger - before crossing Cook Strait.
Our van had a name painted on the door already (it's called "Mike" ... who would call a van Mike?) which was a little too cute for my taste. But then we pulled on to the Interislander ferry in a line of many identical campervans and I suddenly realised the merit in an individual touch.
In the South Island, we headed over the steep Hill into Takaka itself, where every shop sells incense, even the post office. Friends of ours were staying nearby at a campsite called Hangdog.
Situated right beside Paynes Ford, which is supposed to offer some of New Zealand's best rock climbing, Hangdog is a campsite just for climbers (no really, you allegedly have to show a harness or they won't let you stay). It's so chocka over the summer that the owners have hung a sign on the gate saying "fully full man".
There's a permanent fire circle set up with a notice asking people to keep the drumming down after 10pm. Chickens were scratching amidst the tents and there were random patches of tomato and zucchini growing. One of the campers was having a garage sale outside his tent. I had a strong feeling no one else there had bought their own cheese knives.
We are staying for the next few nights at Golden Bay Holiday Park on Tukurua Beach. There is a high pohutukawa hedge between us and the sea but someone has thoughtfully cut windows in it, so we have a water view over the private beach. Down the road from the campsite you can buy blueberries and candles and we are just five minutes from the Mussel Inn, surely one of New Zealand's best pubs. But today there are, alas, no mussels to be had.
"The harvesters are on holiday too," the woman behind the bar explains, quite sternly. I thought hippies were friendly? Outside, near yet another fire circle, there's a telegraph pole with cellphones nailed to it. I hide my Blackberry and decide not to mention the cheese knives here either. But I can recommend the on site-brewed Freckled Frog Feijoa Fizz and the Mussel Inn Captain Cooker Manuka Beer, made from the original recipe recovered from Captain Cooks diaries.
The campervan (I cannot bring myself to call it Mike) was a trooper, making its way without complaint to Farewell Spit and around the coast, where we stopped and walked out to Wharariki Beach. The very top of the South Island's West Coast, Wharariki was windswept and deserted. The only other living thing we saw was a seal, and by "saw" I mean almost stepped on - a seal looks a lot like a log when you're not concentrating. The walk out to the beach took us 20 minutes; the sprint back pursued by an angry seal was somewhat faster.
On our final night in Golden Bay, we ran into the man we met at Tutira, David, who was travelling with his wife and son.
They were worried five weeks would not be long enough.
"There's just so much more to see," he said. "Every day."
CHECKLIST
Further information: See exploremore.co.nz.
