2022-12-24 — Christmas by the River

I’m writing this on the 25th (US) time… so Merry Christmas!!! 🎅❤️⛄❄️😁🥳🥰😍😊🎄🎉

Let’s see, though it was Christmas morning in New Zealand, I wasn’t wanting to get up early in the morning to set up Christmas lights and have a Christmas morning in the dark, even though it would have looked super cool to have the tree we were parked next to all lit up. 😬

So, i got slept in until I’d guess maybe 8 something? Maybe 9:00? 🙃

I don’t remember.

But I got up, pulled all the Christmas stuff out of the car that I had secretly bought, and started preparing Christmas morning for Chase. 😊

I put the two bottles of ginger beer in the river to get cold. I stuffed the Christmas stockings and hung them up in the tree next to the car. And I strung the Christmas lights from the car power source into the tree around one of the branches.

Of course, since it was bright light outside, you couldn’t see the lights all that well, but you could see them at least a little bit. 😊

Eventually, Chase is ready to get up, and I brought him over for Christmas morning, playing jingle Bell Rock on my phone while he opened his stocking, which was full of just… junk food. 🙃

I had put his baseball hat and sunglasses on his stocking, so he’d know which was his. 😊

Fun stuff. 😊

We ate a tiny bit, drank our Ginger beers, and both spent time on the phone talking to different people.

And both making lightning fast trips up the road to Castle Hill, a super popular tourist site that… had a bathroom. 🙃

From our little Christmas morning spot, we actually went to Castle hill, braving the large tourist population that had packed the car park.

Fortunately, there was a section of the area that absolutely no one was going in because it was completely fenced off. What they didn’t realize, was that it wasn’t fenced off because people weren’t allowed in. It was fenced off to make sure that whoever went in followed the instructions of being in that particular part of the attraction, as they were conducting scientific research inside that area and wanted people to be careful around certain things. So if you actually went up to the gate to enter that area, you would see the sign, realize the gate was open, and that you were able to access that area of the park, they just asked you to be careful.

Man, I really love New Zealand. It’s just so cool. I think our American culture could learn a whole lot from the kiwis and the way they run their lives and their country.

Anyway, so he and I explored that fenced off area a little bit, mostly looking for places to sit down and think and write and whatnot–he writing with pen and paper, and I working on the post that was taking me so long to write.

We spent probably a couple hours there just in that spot, I think. After having explored the other area (the one all the other tourists go to) for maybe 20 minutes or so.

After Castle Hill, we drove back to the devil’s punch bowl waterfall parking lot, because we knew we had phone reception there. Chase was pretty much done with adventuring for the day, which gave me a good opportunity to finally try and pound out post that I was struggling with, which I did. 🥳

I’m sure it wasn’t the best I could have done. But at least it was something, and I hoped that it was accurate and would capture the overall sentiment. And, to be transparent, I hoped that if my friend decided to read my posts again, it would help to heal the hurt I’d caused and the damage I’d done to our relationship.

After a few more hours or so of writing, I finally got the post done and published, only to spend the next 45 minutes editing it because I’d forgotten stuff or not written some things very well.

Long, hard post. 🙃

It was dusk and getting dark by the time I finally finished. Chase wanted to share a TV show with me that he had enjoyed called The 100, which, was absolutely terrible. 🙃 He had remembered it being a lot better, but we both laughed again and again at how amazingly terrible it was. The acting, the constant cliches, the… everything. 😆

I’m usually really easily entertained, but it was so terrible that I guess in a way it was entertaining on its own just to see how bad it could be for a likely high budget, long running TV show. 🙃

Anyway, we called it a night after I think three episodes and headed over to find a place to sleep, ending up crashing where we had started our first hidden waterfall hike by the train tracks.

Catching back up!!!

Love to all! 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen