coming up

Our time in New Zealand is almost drawing to a close.
We're working for two more weeks in Dunedin, then packing up and heading to the ski fields before taking the hard steps: packing for the next few months of travel, sorting the things we don't need for sending home, selling the car.
We came here with a relatively heavy suitcase and a backpack each. Considering we were coming for a year, it wasn't an outlandish amount of stuff, but there were some clothes packed we never needed.
Now we face an even tougher packing job. Since we're not flying directly back to the States, we can't drag as much with us. In another instance of the States supersize culture and the willingness of companies to accommodate it since we mean so much money, flying to or from the States gets you more than double the luggage allowance than flying anywhere else. So we have to cut our two heavy bags down to one bag of less than 20 kilos each.
The process has already started. We mailed a some clothes home and gave some away when we left Wellington to come to Dunedin, and I left my (older and battered) suitcase in the donations pile.
We've still got a long way to go, however. The bags we still have with us have disgorged enough contents to fill our room in the hostel. We'll also have to somehow pack for summer and winter conditions over the next four months.

We'll leave New Zealand the first week of August for nearly a month in Australia. Early in September we'll fly north to Bangkok and spend two or three weeks in Southeast Asia before flying to Beijing.
A couple weeks in China and then we head to Europe. We plan on spending time in Germany (hopefully seeing our former flatmates) and several areas of the UK and Ireland, trying to stay with friends we've met here and elsewhere.
Then back to the States in late November or early December. And then I have no idea.