Despite being super tired, I’m still not sleeping well at all. 🙃
Every night seems to be getting worse lately. Shoulder and hip. Worrying about waking Chase up. Sleeping on my back. Noise. They all make for a pretty challenging sleeping session.
But I’m doing fine, gratefully.
Well, that’s true and not true. I’m struggling a lot emotionally right now. My insecurities are kicked into high gear and my stress level is through the roof. I need a vacation from my vacation. In on such a messed-up place emotionally that this trip isn’t giving me any relief at all.
Gosh I’m such a pathetic case. 🙃
I wanted to put that out there because I want to be honest and as transparent as I can be without causing harm to others. I’m having a lot of fun, for sure, but I’m also stressed to the max and badly struggling at the same time.
I’ve lost faith in myself, having come to the tentative, but painful perspective that I’m not really ever gonna grow and make progress, that I’m just who I am, and I’m all my faults will never be overcome. All i really have to give is that I care and want to help. But as a close friend, a companion, etc.. I seem to not have what it takes to be any of those things long term.
Anyway, so the undercurrent right now for me, beneath the fun (which is real), is stress and pain. Mountains of both that instead of surmounting on this trip, or making progress on, I’ve added to, and resilience… I have nearly none.
So… yeah… wanted to put that in there because that’s what’s real, and I’m trying to be real here.
Gosh, sometimes I hate being me.
Anyway, morning came, and Chase drove us over to Isengard, where I took a bath in the frigid waters 🥶, rinsing out my clothes as well.
That was nice. 🙃 I really do enjoy the refreshing feeling of cold showers/baths. It’s… not comfortable, of course, but the feeling after is nice.
It was a bit rainy, and the forecast called for more rain, so being as beat up as we were from the hike, we decided to take a rain day.
We headed into Queenstown, which… was not something we wanted to do, but we thought it might be fun to catch a movie. So we bought tickets for Avatar: The Way of Water, and after getting Chase some McDonald’s, then parking for a little while on the side of a road, we headed into town to try and find a place to park.
Ugh, I hate tourist towns. It’s like one big tourist soup.
Cute little town otherwise, just… slammed with people people everywhere–stores and shopping crowding nearly every view, manufactured adventures everywhere.
Just not my thing.
To each their own, though. I’m glad that most people seem to choose the crowded tourist places, as it means so many fewer people, if any, at the places I love.
Sorry, I love people, as I hope is abundantly clear. I just… hate commercialism and crowds and the 90 mph life. The slow, naturalistic, simple life beckons, and I come, as often as I can.
The soul craves it.
Sorry, I know you know all this.
Anyway, we finally found a place to park a handful of blocks away from the theater, and we walked through the shopping centers to get there. It was just a little three-screen theater with smaller screens and not many seats. Kind of nice, actually. 🙂
Chase, thought he bought tickets for the middle in the back, his favorite place to sit, but I realized when we got there, he’d actually bought the middle, front row. 🙃
Oops.
So we were smack up against the screen. 😆 Not our favorite place, but gratefully, human eyes can only focus on point at a time anyway, so… they just have to travel a bit faster to get to the rest of the screen, and eyes move pretty quickly, so it was fine. 🙂
The movie was good. I’m easily entertained. 🙃 There are points that i thought were… less than good, and the ending action seemed to completely lose touch from the rest of the movie, contradicting a major story line that left both Chase and I scratching our heads going, wait, nobody caught that? That’s… kind of… huge. But whatever, it was still fun. 🙂
Ironically, it stopped raining before we even got to the theater. Most of the day actually turned out to be rain free. 🙃
Whatever, we still needed a break for our ailing bodies. 🙃
Chase, being much younger than I, recovers much more quickly. Just walking down the steps was starting to hurt my knees again. 😬
My poor battered and abused body. Wish I were smarter when it comes to stuff like that. It just doesn’t cross my mind that I could hurt myself. I just… think of what it will take to accomplish the goal and then do it. I rarely recognize ahead of time where I need to hold back or hold off.
Anyway, we got back to the car, and seeing rain in the forecast for the next couple of days, we decided to head down to the Catlins on the southern coast to pass the time in places where rainy weather wasn’t really going to inhibit activities, just make them a little more challenging.
The drive south, while we still had light, was beautiful, even though the lake never became the super turquoise that I think you see in pictures.
We found a place to sleep on a side road on the way down south, amazingly with no save flies despite being near a creek. 🥳🎉🥳, and we called it a night.
Oh! We learned that the hike we did was 27 km up and back, which didn’t count all the extra I did. I’m guessing I did somewhere around 30-32 km.
😬😬😬
More importantly, MWLEPAEPBTWFT. 🥰
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 