Wow, the sun was bright so early today, waking me up with the light and waking Chase up with the heat. We tried different things to squeeze a little more sleep time.
The cool wind helped, with the doors cracked a little and something set up to block the light through the window a bit.
Once I was awake awake, I was feeling pretty badly about how things ended up with a goodbye experience for Chase with the girls.
Realizing i had left our little guide books with the girls, making it easy to have an excuse to meet back up with them for Chase’s birthday, I hatched a little plan.
😎
Chase likes to go to McDonald’s for breakfast, so I told him I was going to go take him to McDonald’s for breakfast for his birthday.
What i didn’t tell him was that we were going to meet the girls there for a late birthday breakfast. 😁
Things seemed to work out great. The books were with the girls, so it was easy to set that up. I asked if I could buy them breakfast, and they agreed, so that was set. What i still needed was ice cream, as Chase liked vanilla Ice cream, and though we’d already eaten the cake the night before, i thought it might be fun to put the ice cream on the pancakes i knew he’d order.
Gratefully-ish, I couldn’t find my passport pouch, thinking I’d left it at one of the several places we’d gone to in order to get change the night before. My lost passport, though concerning, was a good excuse to run into Pak N Save to get ice cream while, at the same time, checking to see if I’d left my passport pouch there. That, and the girls were gonna be about 10 minutes later, and i didn’t want Chase to be done eating when they arrived, so everything went perfectly so that I could get ice cream without any tipping Chase off to what was happening.
so I ran into pack n save, checked for my passport, which they didn’t have, bought the ice cream and some crepes, and when i got back to the car with the ice cream and crepes, Chase had found my passport 🥳.
and I don’t think he saw that I’d bought ice cream, so that was good. 😁
From there, we headed over to McDonald’s, I giving him the green light to order whatever that he wanted to on the menu. It’s amazing how expensive fast food has become. He ordered just two sets of pancakes, a McMuffin or something like that, and an orange juice, and that was 40 something dollars new zealand, which is like $25 or so american. That used to be the price of going out to a pretty nice restaurant.
Just crazy how the world has changed so much and prices have skyrocketed.
I must be getting old 🙃
It wasn’t too long after Chase had his food delivered to our table that the girls showed up. He had been pretty down all morning, and when he saw them coming he was both shocked and I think pleasantly surprised.
In a lot of ways, which I didn’t expect, it was really hard for him to have them there because, of course, he really wanted to spend time alone with the one he’d gotten really close to. I tried to make that happen a couple of times during the something like 4 hours that we spent in McDonald’s. The one girl would leave to use the bathroom or something, and i would excuse myself as well, but the one girl would always come back quickly, so… that didn’t really work. I probably should have just said something directly, offering to give them some space instead of being all secretive about it. And i probably should have mentioned something to the other girl, but that would make sense to do, and of course, I’m not in the business of doing things that make sense. 🙃
Chase seemed to be enjoying himself quite a bit. It wasn’t until a bit later that I realized that he was struggling.
When we finally said goodbye again, with another round of hugs and whatnot, I realized afterward that it had been super super hard on him.
(sigh)
Gratefully, after we had sat and talked for a while, he arranged to meet up with the one girl again, so we went over to the aquatic center where they were.
Interestingly, for Chase’s birthday, I’d been a heck of a lot more out of my clamshell than I’d been before, joking a good bit more, worrying less about what the girls were thinking about me.
That was nice. 😊
I dropped Chase off at the aquatic center and headed over to the laundry mat. I looked at the machines, and then I looked for a place to buy soap, but I forgot that so far in New Zealand the laundromats don’t offer a way to buy soap. I didn’t read the signs closely enough to realize that most of the machines provided the soap for you on their own without you adding it, so back over to pack n save, bought some laundry detergent, and headed back to the laundromat.
I think I spent the next three hours at the laundromat. After I returned from getting soaked, I realized that the machines, most of them anyway, provided their own soap, so I threw the laundry in and let it get going.
Unfortunately, I realized a bit too late that the machines barely provided any soap at all. I watched them spinning around and couldn’t really see any suds, so I figured they weren’t providing so, but when I pulled them out after they were done, they did smell like detergent a bit, so I was like okay whatever, and I threw them in the dryers. But after they were dry, I went to smell them again, and realize that I could still smell a little bit of nasty on the underwear, confirming that they indeed had not provided enough soap. Thus after spending an hour and a half or so doing laundry and spending I think probably 12 American dollars to do just the one load, I ended up having to do everything all over again, this time using the detergent that I bought.
So I waited there at the laundromat for another hour and a half or so while the laundry did its thing. 🙃
Meanwhile, I put my headphones on and rocked out to my music well wandering all around the parking lot with nothing but my shorts on and singing fairly loudly along with the music. 😁
I made one pretty stupid decision, though, and that was to do like 10 push-ups or something. I didn’t realize exactly what I was doing to myself until way later when I realized that those few push-ups massively aggravated my rib injury.
I haven’t been able to sleep on my left side without a decent amount of hip pain and a decent amount of rib pain ever since those injuries. The rib pain keeping me from doing quite a few things recently. I haven’t been anywhere near as adventurous.
I’ve certainly enjoyed this trip so far, but my body has been beat to a pulp it seems and doesn’t want to heal.
Both my shoulders hurt in specific positions, my left hip hurts when I lie down on that side, and hurts pretty good, and it gets sore when climbing mountains and whatnot. I don’t have a clue what I actually did to it. I figured it was just a bruise smacking The Rock so hard while sliding down that rock slide waterfall, but a bruise.. shouldn’t it have healed by now? It’s been more than 2 weeks, but my hip still hurts pretty good. And my left shoulder still hurts from injuring it nearly 3 weeks ago, just a very mild injury. Am I right shoulder from a week ago. And it hasn’t even been from doing crazy things. It’s just been normal life. The hip I guess you could say maybe was doing something a bit more adventurous, but the other stuff… no, not at all.
Anyway, after however long it took to do the laundry–twice–I got a message from one of the girls letting me know that she had lost her phone and was using Wi-Fi to send me a message from her other phone, and asking me to let Chase and the other girl know to go back to where she had dropped them off, as she couldn’t contact them directly, or something like that.
It had started raining by then, so I’ve been singing out in the parking lot a little bit in the rain, but now with the laundry done, I headed back over to where the one girl was who’d lost her phone and where I dropped Chase off at the aquatic center.
The girl who’d lost her phone wasn’t there when I got there, and I had my music up with my shirt still off walking around in the rain singing when she walked up. 🙃
I quickly took a bathroom hair washing and sponge bath break before helping her find her phone, as I hadn’t washed my hair in quite a while and felt pretty nasty and didn’t want to put clean clothes back on without at least somewhat of a bath. 🙃
I spent the next… however many minutes or so with my headlamp, as it was dark, looking around to see if she dropped her phone anywhere between her van and the aquatic center, but I couldn’t find anything. So I spent a while trying to use the Android find-my-phone feature, but she had turned off her location settings, so I wasn’t able to use that either.
Finally, even though it was raining, I suggested that we move the stuff in our little wagon over to make space to put some of their stuff in our vehicle, so that we could more easily shift stuff around to search her van.
So we did that, putting a handful of things in our wagon, and then carefully searching one section of her van at a time, and shifting the contents of the van from section to section. After probably 15 minutes or so of shifting stuff around and looking, I opened the passenger side sliding door poked my head up in a way to see over it and down, as their bed / futons / whatever you want to call it was pressed up against that door, and there I saw her phone. It had fallen off the back of the futon thingy and slid into a very tiny little pouch in the door itself.
🥳
She was relieved. 😊
After that, i offered her food and whatnot, but she didn’t seem keen on that or spending time with me, so I ate dinner, sang to my music and worked on catching up on my journal posts.
It got pretty late, and so I suggested that she go ahead and go back to her campsite so that she could get some rest, as the last time Chase and the other girl had been out talking like this, they were out all night.
At first she didn’t want to, but when I mentioned later on that chase suggested the same thing, she relented and headed out.
I stayed up for a while longer, and just when I had decided to move things over enough to take a nap while I waited for Chase and the other girl to get back, I got a message from Chase saying that they were heading back, so I threw some soup cans on the engine, so they could have a warm meal after walking around during a cold night in the rain, started the car, and waited for them.
They got back very quickly after sending me that message, ate their soup, the one girl eating food out of a can for the first time in her entire life. 🙃
We only had two seats available in the car, so I gave my seat to the girl, and I jumped in the back where all the seats were folded down and all the stuff was packed in.
And of course, as Murphy’s law would predict, the first time in nearly a month on the trip that I was writing in the car without sitting in my seat, Chase gets pulled over for speeding. 🙃
So there I was riding without a seatbelt. Oops🙃.
Since we were Americans and didn’t have scannable driver’s licenses with all our information and addresses, there wasn’t really any way for them to give us tickets, so we just got warnings. 😎
🥳
We laughed and smiled our way through the whole experience both during and after with the officers, and had a good laugh by ourselves as we finished the short drive over to drop that in off at the camping spot.
Chase it had an absolutely fantastic, and very long, conversation with the girl that left him feeling much better than he had for quite a while, so that was super good. 😊
After dropping her off, we decided to head east across the bottom of the island, only making it probably 45 minutes or an hour before Chase is too tired to drive, and I was tired as well, so we just parked on the side of the road on a little really wide shoulder area, and bed down for the night.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 