A former co-worker of mine had been to New Zealand several years ago, and mentioned kayaking in Milford Sound as the absolute favorite thing she'd done. Looking back, she'd written in an e-mail that "it supposedly rains there all the time," which I'd somehow overlooked in my haste to book a trip.

The morning we set off for Milford Sound from our cottage in Te Anau, we stopped to ask the cottage owner if he knew the weather forecast. Peter, who was so hospitable that he and his wife had invited us to join their Christmas barbecue dinner the night before, led us through his house to his computer, where he checked the weather on the Internet. "Well," he said, looking at the computer screen, "the good news is that they're wrong about 50 percent of the time."

Needless to say, they weren't wrong. Once we entered the Sound, the rain was absolutely relentless, even causing serious flooding on some of the famed hiking trails nearby.

But it was kayaking that we were after, even though we'd never done it before, and Rosie, our cheery British guide, was still "keen" to go despite the weather. "When you're wet, you're wet," she said, attempting to assure us and a French couple who had also signed up that because there was no wind, the conditions were perfectly safe.

By the time we got dressed in four layers of protective rain gear and boarded our boat to the kayak launch point, however, the wind had picked up so much that we were instructed to stand rather than sit to avoid hurting our backs as the boat violently thudded over waves.

When even Rosie started to have second thoughts, the French couple bowed out entirely, opting to forfeit about $200 rather than dare enter the churning Sound via kayak. Rosie thought that with a different starting point, she could make it work, and Jason and I figured that having come this far, we might as well get in the water.

And lo and behold, Rosie was right. When you're wet, you're wet.

Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world. Sitting in the kayak in the shadow of 5,000-foot mountains framing the water, I felt as small as a sandfly, somehow co-existing in between the immense waterfalls and hulking cruise ships. In my mind, a later, sunnier, kayaking experience actually paled in comparison to the wildness of Milford Sound in the rain.

Rule 3: When desperation strikes, throw money to the wind.

Nine days into the honeymoon, we arrived in Nelson, which bills itself as "New Zealand's Sunniest City." Reading empirical data of about 2,500 hours of sunshine per year, I'd gotten my hopes up — only to be greeted by a downpour when we actually arrived.

In all burgeoning marriages, of course, there are tests. But our honeymoon was starting to feel like a gauntlet.