After cleaning out the car in the morning, we headed to what I would call little Yellowstone. Yellowstone. Rotorua is a hot bed for hot pots. They’ve got all sorts of geysers and yellowstoney type things.
They had a huge tourist destination place in the main city, but we found one that we thought would be much less touristy quite a ways out of town. Unfortunately, it’s still turned out to be super touristy, but we went ahead and bought tickets and walked around the area for a couple hours or so. So. It was fun to see the little hot pots and the big hot pools and all the steam and all the mineral formations and whatnot. Admittedly, even when seeing really cool things, when it comes in that kind of a package where you’re surrounded by lots of tourists, and info, signs and all sorts of other things, it’s just not as interesting.
I know that where I hiking through some uncharted region and came across a place like that, I would be absolutely blown away and amazed and excited with all the adventure.
Hold on, we’ve got a cow in the road.
And now a rabbit.
🙃
I forgot to mention the dog chase almost hit earlier and the peacock as well.
If it’s not already obvious, we’re not in the city anymore. 🙃
Anyway, we finished up our little walk around tour of little Yellowstone just as the rain started coming down. Perfect timing. After that, we were supposed to drive to the redwoods, as supposedly they had a redwood forest, but Chase thought we drove through the redwood Forest and kept right on driving, and I didn’t really stop to ask him what he was doing until we were like 15 minutes out of town, and he thought we’d already seen them, so we just figured we just keep going instead of going back. Going back. So we ended up heading back towards Tauranga where we had spent a night several days before, but this time we went to Pukehina Beach on the east side of Tauranga, staying the night there, and finishing up watching the two towers of the Lord of the Rings.
If everything goes as it seems to be going, we will probably be going to the land of Mordor here in the next two or three days or so. So it’s kind of fun to be watching the movies and seeing the landscapes at the same time. 🙂
Once again, we were blessed with lots of wind through the night, so we didn’t have any trouble with bugs. That said, if we do get to a place where we have bug trouble again, Chase found some mosquito netting, so we’ll be able to have our windows down at night and not have to worry about the bugs. Go chase!
I personally had a bit of a rough day yesterday. Things aren’t going well with either of my businesses right now. Bleeding money out of the one, and not making any money with the other, and dealing with angry customers who are leaving bad reviews and claiming that we’re damaging their cars. I can’t prove that Malachi didn’t damage the car in question, but it’s unlikely, and we’ve got a complete liar for a customer, so it’s just a crappy situation, and I’m going to end up eating over $500 on this job just to try and save a bad review. Hopefully he’ll turn it into a good review. He said he would, but I guess we’ll see.
Between the annual Thanksgiving, slow down, and then a bad review is the first or second review that everyone is seeing on three out of my four Google. My business pages, business with my auto company is pretty much at a complete stop right now. Malaki hasn’t done a paying job since the 23rd of November.
It’s pretty rough, and it’s pretty stressful for me to watch this happening to my business while I’m gone.
So I was really stressed out all day long trying to find ways to do damage control from many thousands of miles away. One of the things that I was trying to do was to figure out how to get a link to share my Facebook business page with people, but after hours of trying to find just a simple link to be able to text people a link to my Facebook so they could give us good reviews, I wasn’t able to find anything reliable. So incredibly frustrating that there isn’t just a simple link to share your business with people. How on earth do they expect to have that be a useful resource if they don’t even give business owners the ability to share the link to their business page with other people. Anyway, I was super frustrated with that, well also super stressed about what was going on with the business in general. I had multiple people trying to help me from the states because I was limited on what I could do here in New Zealand.
Trying to bypass those limitations, I was trying to also get in contact with T-Mobile in order to buy an international pass so that I can have unlimited international calls and more data, as I’d run out of my complimentary high-speed data already for the month. Month. But it was turning out to be a huge ordeal just to deal with T-Mobile as well.
If that weren’t enough, I hadn’t received the email from Qantas about getting the credit for my canceled itinerary. So I called Qantas, and no joke talked to I think seven different people and every single person that I talked to between the last time. I talked to them several days ago and this time, every single person had a different understanding of how everything worked. They didn’t know their own systems. And that was the same with T-Mobile. The guy that I was dealing with kept trying to require me to give information that none of the other texts that I had spoken with over the last several days required. It was so frustrating dealing with so many different people who just simply don’t know their jobs and know how to do them.
Anyway, I finally got things straightened out with T-Mobile and got my international phone plan turned on and paid for, but I have almost given up with Qantas. The last guy that I talked to was a customer service guy based out of South Africa, and he told me that he couldn’t find any of the information that I needed and told me to call customer service. It was like excuse me, you are customer service.
It was clear he didn’t want to help me, or was just completely unable to do his job, as he told me the only way to resolve the issue was going to be to go to the website and fill out a request form with customer care and have them get back with me. But when you go to the website, the first thing they tell you to do is to call the phone number that I called to talk to that guy. So absolutely frustrating. So in the middle of all those things happening all at once, I had a bit of a meltdown on the beach. Chase, I think hearing me melt down, came out and we walked up and down the beach, putting all the rest of the stuff to bed for a little while. Then we came back to the car, washed the rest of the two towers, and went to bed.
Love and bugs, I mean hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 