After many months of waiting and numerous phone calls to their airline, Mary and her husband Sir Kerry Burke were able to secure a flight back home to New Zealand.

"We feel so incredibly lucky to have got home as the situation in NSW has become so extremely serious," Mary said.

Mary and Kerry were left grounded in the Bega Valley at Mary's home when their return flights to New Zealand kept being changed and cancelled.

The impending worry was that if Mary didn't return to their second home in New Zealand within six months, her NZ pension would have stopped and they had been out of the country for four months already.

After many back and forth phone calls with Air New Zealand, Mary discovered there were no flights available from Sydney and that they couldn't fly via Melbourne as the border between NSW and Victoria had shut down.

All flights until the end of September were full, so they were put on a waiting list in the meantime.

"We were not very hopeful, I must say, but at least it gave us a reference number and we were in the system," Mary said.

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On July 29, they received a call out of the blue, informing them they could fly on August 3, so the happy couple quickly packed their bags and prepared for the journey.

"We couldn't believe we were really on our way until the plane took off," she said.

Mary said the bustling Sydney Airport she was used to was completely deserted and all the colourful shops were shut.

"As soon as we arrived in Auckland we were whisked off in a coach to managed isolation at a quarantine facility in Hamilton," she said.

During the two weeks quarantine Mary was able to use the empty car park at designated times in the morning and afternoon to exercise.

"I became a fanatical walker doing endless laps of the car park."

Mary recorded the number of steps she made while in quarantine and said it totalled 133,031 steps, equating to around 101 kilometres.

"I told you I was fanatical but it passed the time, there must have been a huge number of people in the hotel but very few used the exercise area.

"Most must just sit in the rooms. I'd have gone barmy if I hadn't been able to exercise," Mary said.

Mary also celebrated her 79th birthday during hotel quarantine, which she said was strange but still special as her daughter Toni Houston had flowers delivered to her room.

Upon their release of their two week hotel quarantine, they discovered all of New Zealand was going into a level four lockdown.

The couple were able to make it to their home, just in time, an hour before the lockdown started.

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