(written on the 25th from notes taken previously)
Sunday in New Zealand means college football Saturday in the United States. 😅
New Zealand is 20 hours ahead of the Mountain Time Zone I was in before heading out here, which means some football games start at 6:00 a.m. here. It’s great. 🙃
Headed into the cave relatively early this morning, and what did I find? Three glow worms glowing in that huge big first room.
Three!
That right there is why I tell people to go at night. People who go in during the day don’t give it a second thought. There’s nothing to see. Yes, there are some pretty cool rooms full of glow worms deeper into the cave, but nothing compares to that first room. Nothing.
But only at night.
Went through the cave a little bit with Alicia this morning, taking some pictures and just enjoying the cave.
There wasn’t really much for me to explore, Chase and I having explored the cave thoroughly last year.
Well… almost thoroughly. I did have a new adventure this time that I’ll get to shortly.
Despite not spending much time exploring, I did go all the way to the end, or at least as far as I’m willing to go.
You get to a point in the cave where the last room, the water disappears into the floor below you, and the very end of the room is a cave-in. I suppose one could go exploring to try and see if there were a way further into the cave, but… At this point in my life, I don’t need to be getting myself stuck in a cave or crushed under some additional cave-in.
I did see an eel, and that was fun. 😊
Alicia turned around at some point while I was going deeper into the cave. On the way out, I decided to do a little adventuring. When you first get into the cave and walk down to the water, you can either go left, which is where everyone goes, or you can go right where the water starts getting deeper and deeper.
This time in the first time that I went to the cave, I went left, but this time, I wanted to see what was to the right. With all the lights off, I could see that there was some light way back in there on the right side where the water gets deep, but I couldn’t see where the light was coming from. I figured it was coming from back over to the left and was from flashlights, but I went back and examined the cave walls and cave ceiling and couldn’t find any place where light would be able to penetrate from that side of the cave over to where I was looking before.
So I decided to go for a swim. 🙃
I set my phone down on the bank, waded into the creek, and once it was about chest deep with a muddy soft bottom (and very cold), I began to swim.
It was fun to swim through that section of the cave. The cave ceiling was probably just a few feet above the water, so it kind of felt like being in a movie scene for me, and as I rounded the bend, I realized that I had discovered a second entrance to the cave!
(I’m sure other people knew there was another entrance, but it was new for me 🙂)
So I swam back, grabbed my phone so I could take pictures, and then swam back holding my phone out of the water with one arm while swimming with the other until I got to a place where I could stand again.
Took several pictures, ran into more eels, and just enjoyed being there. Fun to explore a little bit. Fun to find something new that I hadn’t known about last time.
When I got back, I had my solar stuff out charging again. I also set my clothes on the horse pasture fence to dry.
While I was there, a couple of young men from Germany, each in a different van, pulled up and parked next to me. One of them was dealing with some sort of noise from his brakes, so I stopped and took a look at his brakes, finding nothing that I could see from the outside, so they got their Jack and Jack stand, and we jacked up the front of the van, and I took a look from the back and found that something had been grinding their rotor down on the inside of the driver side rotor.
After messing around with it for a little bit, something fell out from between the dust shield and the rotor. Given what I was seeing, and given that something fell out, I’m guessing that on one of his drives down a gravel road, he managed to get a piece of gravel wedged between the dust shield and the rotor, which would then get stuck against the caliper bracket and just grind down the metal.
After hearing that thing fall out, which I’m assuming was a rock, we lowered the van back down, and he drove it a little bit, and the sound was gone. 🎉
No need to take it to a mechanic now.
We hung out and chatted for a little while, one of the young men showing me what all he had done to build his van out, and then I wish them goodbye and headed Northeast into town, once again glued to my phone and the football scores. 🙃
Whangarei had been my first stop on our first night in New Zealand when I was here with Chase Bank in ’22-’23. We had stopped at Whangarei Falls and slept in the park parking lot over night.
This time, my first stop was the local LDS Church building (being Sunday), but it was afternoon, and I had missed the last meetings for the day.
I chatted with a couple for a little bit who was still inside the building before heading on over to the same waterfall from 3 years ago.
We had been lucky back then when we stayed overnight at Whangarei Falls because our vehicle wasn’t self-contained. This time, though, my vehicle was, so there wasn’t any concern about getting fined for parking where I shouldn’t be. 🙏
As I was wandering around, I noticed that someone had either decided to throw down a glass bottle on one of the walkways or had tossed it up really high trying to have it land on the black top walkway, because there was a very significantly set of glass bottle leftovers all over the walkway with many shards and larger pieces of broken glass all over in the grass.
I spent the next… probably hour or so? cleaning up the broken glass, searching the grass for pieces and finding… so many.
My van had come with a little brush, so I used that to sweep up the glass that was smaller than what I could reasonably pick up with my fingers.
Once I got that all cleaned up, I set everything up for the night and crashed, my first night in my new rolling home.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 