New York born-and-bred, a real estate agent and an engineer move to Lake Hawea to restore old cars and teach yoga. Really? Yes it’s true, and Steve and Jennifer Rumore say life has never been better.

They had never thought about living in New Zealand. Steve was working in the family engineering business, designing and building off-road racing cars. Jen had her own real estate business.

A man approached Steve about working for him in a business he was setting up designing and building custom vehicles. They worked on the idea for weeks. Then the man mentioned he would like to do it in New Zealand. Would the Rumores like to move too?

The suggestion took them completely by surprise, but they did some research, and applied for visas. Then funding for the business fell through and the idea was shelved.

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Four years later, the Rumores received a letter saying their application for New Zealand visas had been approved. They weren’t just offered work visas, they were offered temporary residency.

"That was in 2009. The US was in severe economic downturn. Real estate and engineering had collapsed. So we thought, why not?” Steve explained.

"We sold up, packed up, gave away, and shipped a 40-foot container of all our household goods and engineering stuff to New Zealand,” Jen added. "We didn’t know where we were going to live, but Steve had been making biodiesel in America, and we heard that Wanaka Wastebusters was using it, so we thought Wanaka might be a good place. By then we were living in Colorado and Wanaka seemed quite similar with lots of the things we liked; no humidity, a small mountain town with good snow, but no permanent snow in town that needed shovelling every day, and four defined seasons.”

They flew into Auckland, bought a car, and drove around the country for six weeks looking for a place they wanted to live. Wanaka still seemed like the best choice, and they now call Lake Hawea home.

Initially Steve got a job restoring vintage cars at the Warbirds and Wheels museum. Now he repairs and restores vintage caravans in the winter, and runs his own bobcat business in the summer.

He’s also designed and built a prototype teardrop caravan ("basically, it's a bed and kitchen on wheels”) which he launched at the A&P Show this year. It comes in three sizes: a small one which slides onto the back of a ute or truck, the standard model, which you can’t stand-up in, and a bigger one which has a self-contained bathroom.

The project he’s currently working on is a new building system for affordable housing. "The majority of the parts will be made in a factory, flat-packed to the site, and assembled in a matter of days. Basically it's made of chiller panels. I'm just working on making it aesthetically pleasing now,” he said.

When they first arrived here, Jen started teaching yoga. That soon expanded to include meditation and, more recently, she’s added sessions with crystal healing bowls and metamorphic foot massage. Her latest ventures are a special ‘Golden Years’ yoga class in Wanaka and a regular class with different teachers at the Lake Hawea Community Centre.

And when she’s not busy looking after their two children (Nicholas, 14, and Celeste, 8), she’s marketing the caravans.

"We realised Wanaka’s not the sort of place where you just do one thing to make a living. It suits us very well doing lots of different things. The only problem is, we have too many ideas and we can’t do them all.”

For more information on the caravans check out the website www.adventurecaravans.co.nz.

To find out more about Jen’s classes call her on 022 097 4596.

PHOTO: Caroline Harker