As usual, despite having gone to bed very late, I wasn’t able to sleep very well, so I was up early again and down by the road just looking at Mount Doom and the neighboring mountain in the early morning light.
It was sitting on the side of the road there that I realized the answer to something that had happened that I didn’t mention in yesterday’s post while we were out boating.
As I was dragging Chase and one of the girls, I think it was, around on the inner tube, Chase found what he thought was some kind of Styrofoam floating in the lake.
I realized while sitting on the side of the mountain, that it wasn’t styrofoam, it was ultralight pumice. 😎
That was so cool! So cool to see rocks so light that they could float because of their porous nature. Periodically well in the lake, we would smack up against one of those super light pumice stones.
But now I knew what Chase was talking about with the floating objects he was finding in the lake. I would learn more about those floating rocks the next day.
Anyway, we got up and ate breakfast and what not and found the beginning of the trail (called “tracks” in New Zealand), and we headed off on our first hiking adventure of our trip–at least, our first dedicated hiking trip. Our bushwacking experience near the Bay of islands was definitely a hike, but it was an impromptu hike, and I guess you could call the hike to shine Falls a bit of a hike, but it wasn’t any more than 30 minutes, so we don’t really count that either. I guess for something to be considered a hike for me it’s got to be on the order of hours long.
The hike was good. It was a bit of a loop ish? We didn’t go all that far. We went up to see two lakes. It was fun to see Mount Doom in the distance and some of the kinds of terrain that looked like the dead marshes from Lord of the rings.
It was on that first hike that the girls found out that I was 40 years old. That was a bit of an awkward moment for me, and I thought it was for them, but they didn’t care, apparently.
My age certainly plays a role in my clamming up. I feel quite awkward being The 40-Year-Old in a group of younger 20-somethings, though the two girls from Europe I would venture to say are much more mature than the average girls their age in the states.
I certainly could be wrong, but it’s a completely different culture over there–way way way different.
I know age can just be a number, and you can find super mature 20 somethings. But it can also be a pretty huge gap as well.
One funny thing is that even though I’m The 40-Year-Old, I’m the big adventurer. So I’m the one spearheading the adventurous type of things much of the time (like exploring our destinations further, crawling behind waterfalls and up and down and around things and whatnot). 🙃
When one of the girls found out that I was 40 years old, it looked to me like her expression completely changed on her face. I found myself worried that she was like holy crap, what is this 40 year old guy doing here?
I was super uncomfortable and worried about it. She asked, “how old did you think we were?”
The way she asked it seemed to me to be again along the same lines of, holy crap, what is his 40-year-old doing with us.
After my talk with chase, though, and after finding out that I had over analyzed and over worried several different things, I decided to face my fear and ask her about her reaction to my being 40.
Unless she was being dishonest, which I don’t think is the case, she was actually really concerned that I had felt that way and felt bad. She didn’t care at all and was more worried that I had felt awkward than anything else. 🙃
That was eye opening for me.
On the walk back to the car, I faced another fear, this time reaching out and talking to the other girl who i was worried didn’t want to be around me. I knew that she had been feeling a little awkward herself and a little uncomfortable herself with some of the interactions and whatnot that we’d had since we’d started traveling together, so I started chatting with her about it, and it was a super good conversation. She got a chance to share how she’s been feeling, and I got a chance to do for her what Chase and the other girl did for me, namely, alleviate some fears I think.
So though it was an uncomfortable hike in a lot of ways, it was also character-building hike in some ways. Choosing to face uncomfortable situations. Choosing to try and overcome challenges and deep-seated demons.
After getting back from the hike, we did one more Lord of the rings visit, going to the waterfall that was the film location for gollum’s pool. Wanting to have my own time swimming in the water, I jumped in the absolutely frigid Waters, one of the girls joining me, but a bit further downstream, as I couldn’t entice her to jump in the pool itself (not that i actually tried to convince her).
After the hike, we all went to a nearby camping spot that had showers you could pay for, and Chase and the girls got showers. Chase and I then headed back to the same place we had slept at the night before, both of us very tired, and falling asleep. I waited up for a little while for the girls to come back, a little concerned about them, as they didn’t get back until like an hour after we did. I guess they had decided to pay it forward and spend some of their money on other people who wanted showers. 😊
Once the girls were back, and I knew they were okay, we crashed for the night.
😴
And thus concluded our first full day in Mordor. 🙃
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 