The internet is a crazy thing.  Through it, you can meet all sorts of people and form lots of random, seemingly unrelated connections.  It’s how we’ve met many of the great people we’re coming to call friends in New Zealand.

First, there’s Travis and Brooke.  I “met” them online through an old high school church friend who, seeing that we were moving to New Zealand, sent me a Facebook message with their information.  Travis is a pastor at one of the Auckland churches.

I commented on Travis and Brooke’s blogs, and that’s how I met Priscilla.  Priscilla read one of my comments, and we started to email back and forth.  We’d done that for close to a year and a half before getting to meet in New Zealand.  She’s so much fun and I’ve loved hanging out with her!

Then there’s Erin and her husband, Keith.  Erin found my blog while looking for bloggers in New Zealand/moving to New Zealand.  She commented, and we began commenting back and forth and emailing.  They moved here about 1 week after we did, and we’ve gone out to dinner, gone to movies, and gone to lunch with them.

We invited Erin and Keith to go to church with us on Sunday and to come to dinner with us, Travis, and Brooke on Thursday.  Travis and Brooke have been great about opening up their home and we’d already been to dinner there once, so this was our second invite.

While out to lunch with Erin on Wednesday, she mentioned that some of their friends, a married couple, were moving to New Zealand, too.  The husband, Jason (?) is arriving mid-July and his wife Shannon is coming in September.  We were chatting about this as we all walked to Travis and Brooke’s for dinner on Thursday.

When we got to Travis and Brooke’s, Brooke mentioned that some of their friends were moving to New Zealand mid-July.  Erin and I looked at each other like, “Could it be…?”  Erin asked what their names were, and sure enough – it’s Shannon and her husband.  Turns out that Shannon, who used to babysit Erin and her little sister, ran cross-country against Brooke and also {I think} went to undergrad at the same college.

It’s so weird, but in a cool way.  Very surreal.

Isn’t the internet great?  It can bring people together and makes the world a smaller place 🙂