I don’t remember exactly what happened in the morning. Somehow, I forgot to create the bullet point list of the day when I did all the other bullet-point lists, so it’s been over a week and a half since that day, and things are a bit harder to remember.
I always wake up pretty early since I don’t sleep so well, and I think that morning was no exception. I believe I went down to the river by myself that morning and hung out and fed the ducks.
At some point in time the girls came down to the river as well, I believe, and so did chase, and on the way back to our cars, because I think we decided to move our cars down to the side of the river next to the camping area, I ran into a gentleman from India I believe who asked me about the earthquake.
Earthquake?
Yup! It was that morning that everyone realized the nobody had been playing pranks on anyone at all. There had been a 5.6 magnitude earthquake centered in the lake just a few miles from us, and shaking everything pretty good.
The forceful rocking of our car had nothing to do with anything but the powerful seismic waves rippling through the ground.
Super cool. That’s only the second earthquake I’ve ever felt in my entire life. The first one being an Arkansas. Kind of funny to have lived in California for a couple years and Utah for so many years and have the only earthquakes I’ve ever felt have been in Arkansas and New Zealand 🙃
Anyway, so that was kind of fun to learn. 😊
We moved our cars down to the Riverside where there was a tree that went out over the river that you could jump from the tree into the river–the water turquoise an absolutely crystal clear.
And cold. 🙃
We alternated between jumping out of the tree and swimming and playing card games, etc, with Chase and I periodically feeding the ducks, something the girls didn’t like at all. 🙃
We got some good videos of the ducks eating right out of our hands. 😎
Also, if I haven’t mentioned it to this point yet, one of the things I love about New Zealand is how the signs at different attractions don’t prohibit certain actions, they just warn you about them. They say that it’s risky to walk next to the waterfall. They don’t prohibit you from walking down to the top of the waterfall. They say it’s risky to go swimming in the river, but they don’t say no swimming, etc. It’s really nice that they allow you to put your own life in your own hands instead of like it is in the United States where everyone’s so worried about someone getting hurt that they prohibit just about everything it seems. As I’m writing this, I think I’m remembering that I’ve mentioned this in one of my recent posts, so please forgive the repeat. It’s just that I’m impressed by it and grateful for the way New Zealand treats risk. Allow people to make their own decisions, and if they make them ones, then congratulations, you get to reap the rewards of your dumb decisions. But they aren’t going to let people making dumb decisions ruin things for other people.
So refreshing.
After our leisurely morning on the banks of the river, chatting with other travelers, playing games and everything else, we headed out to visit Huka Falls with the girls.
That was definitely one of the more touristy waterfalls that we’ve been to, but it was still impressive to see such an enormous volume of white water spilling down at such a high rate of speed. Even the river where we were jumping into next to the camping park was a super fast flowing river. On the edges where we were jumping in, it was fine, but out in the middle, it was super super fast flowing. That fast flowing was multiplied many times the closer it got to the falls until spilling over the falls at a super high rate of speed–like a big, white, frothy explosion of water.
Having been on the trip for about 2 weeks at that point, it was about time to do laundry, and the girls needed to do laundry as well, so we all headed over to a relatively nearby laundromat to get our suds on.
We started a couple loads of laundry, and I wandered over to the nearby bungee tower looking for a place to use the bathroom (I had to settle for a tree).
As I walked back to the laundromat, I noticed that the person I had tried to help with his car as I was walking away was still needing help, so Chase and I helped them get their car going, and then we drove to a nearby McDonald’s where they actually had an airplane as one of their dining rooms (like a 737 fuselage), sadly, since it was after 5:00, the airplane dining room wasn’t available, so we all just got our food and ate in the regular dining room.
That was our first dinner, the girls wanting to make us a second dinner later on after we finish doing our laundry. So we finished dinner there, finished our laundry, went back to the same camping place because they would let us stay in the same location three nights in a row, ate the wraps that the girls made us, and headed to bed.
And that… was the day. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 