So, I woke up that morning with a little bit of a surprise. Chase, unbeknownst to me, had asked his boss if he could extend his trip a little bit longer, so when we were both awake lying in the back of Sophie, come morning, he looked at me and said something like “I’m staying.”
He then explained to me that his boss’s boss had okayed his request for yet another extension of his trip. 🙃
No longer was it a small guilt trip to stay, it was “have a great time!”
So… suddenly, we weren’t needing to buy tickets for the ferry to the South Island. Nor did we need to go anywhere at all. The girls, expecting that we were going to be leaving had written us very kind notes for us to read when we left, but now we weren’t leaving.
🙃
They ended up giving us the notes anyway just because they’d already written them, and we decided to go ahead and split up anyway, as they had things they wanted to do up north, and we were going to head Northwest.
So we drove back to Taupo to get some things for Chase. We also bought a bunch of different electronic gadgets and adapters and whatnot to aid in our charging and whatever else for our trip.
Then we met up with the girls one more time to help them with their car, as one of them had accidentally broken one of the sliding door handles, so I ordered a door handle for her, and they went and bought it and picked it up, and then they met us at an auto parts store where we installed the door handle for them.
We had lunch together after that, playing a version of the restaurant game I used to play with missionaries on my mission and with dates after my mission to keep it simple when trying to find places to eat.
We ended up at an Indian restaurant, and we enjoyed a nice little meal there, talking, chatting, joking around and everything until far too late. 🙃
I say far too late because earlier in the day I had arranged for us to meet up with the girl we met up near the Bay of Islands a couple weeks before for dinner in Cambridge, and since we had a very late lunch, we were pretty late getting into cambridge, and already rather full. 🙃
Gratefully, we had a fun time chilling with our friend in the Pizza Hut parking lot in Cambridge, talking about all sorts of things, and getting into some really deep discussions about life and relationships and dating and all sorts of things. It was a pretty fun conversation, and she wasn’t concerned at all about eating dinner, so we all just sat and chatted until something like almost midnight, which was crazy late for her because she had to be up at like 4:30 in the morning because she takes care of racehorses, and I think there was going to be a race the next day or something. 🙃
During my conversations with her, it seemed pretty clear to both Chase and me that she was pretty interested in me. It’s been a little while since I’ve played the dating game. I still don’t even know what to do with that, as my heart is still stuck somewhere else in a lot of ways… waiting.
So when someone is interested in me, or when I’m interested in someone, it dies pretty quickly in my own heart because my heart really isn’t all the way into it. I can’t just let go and be interested.
So that’s a little awkward and complicates things for me. 😶
Anyway, we said good night to her, and I started the drive from Cambridge to Raglan. For whatever reason, probably near constant lack of sleep, I was super tired on the drive over there, nearly falling asleep multiple times.
As tired as I was, I ended up pulling over into a church parking lot that doubled as a windmill viewing lot. Don’t ask me why on Earth they wanted to create a lot to look at the six visible windmills, but whatever. We bed down for the night, and that was that.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 