I haven’t opened my wallet and a year the client is making me download all the blocks over the past year which could take up to a few days. I’d rather not have to do this. Is there a way around this?
If you use NCC then click on ‘Settings’ and enter a host of your choice into the ‘Host’ field, e.g. alice2.nem.ninja.
That way your ncc gets connected to a remote host and you are synced. Pick a host that is near your location (a host to which you have a good ping).
In addition to what BloodyRookie said:
If you have the private key you could use the lightwallet.
As a side note I doubt it would take longer than a couple of hours to download the entire chain… 
you can download a compressed and in high speed from http://bob.nem.ninja/
http://bob.nem.ninja/nis5_mainnet.h2.db.zip
or you can use one of those hosts to connect NCC
http://nodeexplorer.com/