Woke up this morning after probably the worst night’s sleep I’ve had this whole trip. Chase went to bed about 9. I got to bed probably about 11:30?
But he had all the windows up. I didn’t want want to wake him; nor did i want to turn my flashlight on to check for bugs. Even without doing much checking, I still killed three mosquitos inside the car–one full of Chase’s blood.
Forgive my ignorance, but do mosquitos and sand flies feed on other things besides blood? I mean… there are so many of the little buggers. Is it just find blood or starve to death? Or is it more like, “Hey, a blood meal! Sweet! Been a while!”
I’d Google it, but I’m in the middle of nowhere on the northwest coast of the South Island.
So… anyway, paranoia about bugs, heat from having the windows up, and still having left rib, hip, and shoulder issues serious enough that each by itself would keep me from being able to sleep on that side, but i have all three. 🙃
I can tell the ribs are starting to heal. Sneezing hurts pretty good, but it’s no longer something that hurts so bad that I have to take a moment to deal with the super sharp pain.
My hip… it’s not good–at all. Funny, it’s my left one, and the injury is so similar to the injury I have on my right hip. It’s crazy.
My shoulder this morning was about 10x worse than it has been. Apparently i aggravated it climbing the sandstone tower at the beach in Abel Tasman.
So… that’s not good. It’s crazy, none of these injuries seemed like issues until later. Ribs… i think it was day two or three before it was at it’s worst, and it’s lasted like that for two plus weeks.
Knees were giving me significant issues today as well. I told Chase that i might have gone on my last walk for a while today.
I guess we’ll see. The knees were much better later today after putting them through a bit of stuff.
I might have already said this, but I’m guessing that regular exercise and stretching prior to this trip would have made it so much less likely that i get injured.
🤞
I’m getting tired. It’s 10:30 pm. Mosquito netting is on two of the windows. Time for bed! I’ll pick this up tomorrow!
…
It’s tomorrow. 😁
After getting up and all that jazz, I decided it was time to try and cook some rice using my trusty pickle jar, and or catalytic converter, so i put in a bunch of rice. I added a bit of water, i set the jar next to the catalytic converter, and… After waiting far too long to check on it, I finally did and haaaaaaaaaad.
Overcooked rice. 🙃
But it was rice!!! Cooked!!!
🥳🥳🥳
And honestly, when combined with beans and my tortilla, didn’t really seem any different than any other rice. Soooooo… success!!!
So we’ve done oatmeal and rice! But the rice pretty much proves the concept once and for all, I think.
We’re set, baby–set!
Now I just have to figure out what this little vegan with stomach issues can actually eat with the rice besides plain beans. 🙃
I put a little bit of the vegan fish food stuff on there, and that was… something at least.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before getting my rice out of the engine, we went to farewell point. My knees were hurting pretty good while I walked, so that wasn’t so fun.
Instead of going on the walk further with Chase, I just sat at the top of the maybe 150 ft cliff that overlooked the ocean and stretched/pondered/did online errands until Chase got back.
From there, the next priority was to find Chase a bathroom, which we found just a handful of minutes away at a super popular beach. And i suppose i need to qualify “super popular.” There were probably 30-40 cars there. But for us, we like zero cars. 1 is company. Three is a crowd. 30-40 is just… No. Doesn’t matter if people say it’s the most-beautiful beach in all of New Zealand.
Maybe at 5:30 a.m., but not with the crowds. Nope. No. Nuh, uh. Not our cup of tea. It’s like when you meet a stunningly beautiful woman, only to find out she’s so focused on selfish, trivial things. Her beauty… gets taken down about 100 notches.
Anyway, we didn’t go to the beach. 🙃
We opted to head to a nearby place with a couple of lakes that had been recommended. So we took a look see, the first was nice, but there wasn’t really a place to just sit and chill, which was what Chase was wanting to do.
There was also a nearby beach, according to Google, but everywhere we went, we saw no trespassing signs and government signs saying that we couldn’t cross because it was private property.
But…
We weren’t deterred. There had to be a way to the beach that was honest and legal.
I jumped online and found a thread where someone was talking about how to get there. They mentioned the house that the owner lived in and asking the owner for permission, so, we figured we’d give it a try.
So we started driving toward a dead-end that we thought might have a house at it. But the access to the dead end had a private property sign on it. But there was a house there at the crossroads!
Right about that moment that someone came driving by in a Razor-style 4×4. I flagged him down and asked about the beach access, letting him know that we’d seen it on the map, but everything was “no trespassing.”
He said the owner of the property would probably let us go, and he pointed out where to enter the property and how to get to the beach from there (a 20-30- minute walk). He said she wasn’t home but would be back soon, and he said there was a phone number we could call as well, posted on one of the signs.
We didn’t see a number anywhere, so Chase suggested we drive to the end of another road to kill time and give the lady a chance to come home.
So we drove to the end of the road, which led to the edge of a tidal flat (that’s one of the new things here on the north island in this area. It’s crazy. The terrain is steep often cliff-filled large hills that descend I sharply into the ocean, but as soon as they hit water, it’s kilometer upon kilometer of tidal flat! Like smack! cliff to flat. It’s weird. Usually in such cases, you have deep ocean, but nope. There are tons of massive inlets that are just huge tidal flats at low tide.
Pretty nutty–especially driving back past one a few hours later and seeing that what was just recently an enormous tidal flat, going inland multiple kilometers, is now full of water!
🐿️
Time-killing successfully accomplished, we rolled back up to the fork in the road at the same time Joyce was coming home. We pulled to a stop, just as she pulled around behind us!
One quick conversation with a very nice Kiwi later, and we’d been given permission!
🥳
What followed was a the opposite of a super-crowded beach.
Dragging along (literally) our boogie boards through cow and sheep pasture, through several fences, across a boggy marsh, and up some dunes, we saw our lovely little solitary private beach.
No people. No power lines. No buildings even visible… A virgin beach. And it was beautiful. 😊
One of the reasons we’d brought the boogie boards was that we’d seen some sand dunes and thought it might be fun to slide down them. So we dragged those along with us, as i mentioned, and… we were not disappointed. 😊
We didn’t even try the biggest dune.
We started on the bunny slope, but apparently I was too heavy to get going very fast. Chase was able to, but I wasn’t.
Such was not the case at the next one. It was so steep. We were thinking about 60-degrees steep. It was crazy steep.
And when you got going? Yeah, no worries about weight there. Man we flew down that slope. My first run was perfect. The boogie board stayed straight, and i got going so quickly that i purposefully bailed as i got close to the bottom, catching a mouthful of sand and getting splashed head to toe on sand.
If was fun, though.
I tried a few more runs, trying to recreate the first, planning not to bail again, but i wasn’t able to stay straight, spinning around and wiping out pretty good each time. 🙃
Covered in sand, and Chase getting sand all in his eyes, it was time to rinse off in the ocean, so we booked it over to the Ocean and rinsed off, noticing on the process that the waves looked really good for boogie boarding.
So Chase ran back to get the boogie boards. He was cold, so that gave him an opportunity to warm up (running to get the boogie boards).
The sun came out, and we enjoyed the waves, catching many, before the wind picked up, and Chase got cold again.
It was lovely. 😊
We headed in, Chase hanging out while I started to explore the coast a bit. I climbed along the rocky sides looking down at the water. The rocks were like sandpaper with sharp edges, so it was easy to climb safely.
I cut the exploration short because I could see in the distance that Chase was huddled up and cold, and storm clouds were rolling in. So i headed back, and we packed up and left, bringing with us a bunch of cardboard that some other people had just left there in their attempts to slide down the dunes.
Really wish people were more considerate. I think most people are, but it didn’t take much trash leaving before a place gets the look of a dumping spot, and that… takes away from… well, at least my experience.
So yeah, we leave every person and every place better than we found them, right? 😊
From there, we headed south, doing a little exploring and looking for a place to crash for the night. We went way out into the middle of nowhere and honestly thought we were alone, not seeing any other cars at all for the whole drive, but upon arriving at a few different places, nope, we weren’t alone. At least a handful of others had gone there, too, though I’d guess locals and not foreign tourists.
Eventually, we picked a spot, saw a beautiful sunset (with me fighting off a host of sand flies on order to watch it), set up the mosquito netting, and crashed for the night.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 