(written on December 18th from notes taken previously)
Not really much to write about today.
I drove the west coast of the Coromandel all the way up as far as I could go.
It was definitely beautiful, and there was one place where I saw the most enormous tree. It seemed like maybe it was 8 or 10 ft across in diameter?
But it was like this collection of trunks that was all one trunk, with one of the main limbs, probably multiple feet in diameter itself, going all the way along the ground, almost touching the ground on one end.
It was the kind of tree that you see in movies with magical forests and whatnot.
Definitely very Lord of the Rings esque. 🙃🧙♂️
I did find myself continuing to feel relieved today, not trading, and actually in a fairly decent space. Somehow, I started looking at the massive financial loss as sort of the price I needed to pay to realize that spending my time in New Zealand trading stocks was not what I needed to be doing while I was here.
An expensive lesson.
Akin to it my brother Richard might call paying the “stupid tax.” 😆
But how nice it was to not have this heavy, dark cloud hanging over, to not have that devastated feeling, the heavy regret, that… lingering pit in my stomach that usually takes weeks or months to go away.
It just… wasn’t there. I felt like I paid an expensive lesson, and now it’s over.
Let’s hope I don’t need yet another replay of the same lesson in the future. 🤞
Anyway, I drove on and on, stopping here and there to take pictures but not really exploring or poking around much.
I probably mentioned it before, but this time in New Zealand, I’m not really feeling very… explorative?
Perhaps it’s my overall emotional state. Perhaps it’s my life circumstances. I don’t know.
I seem to be living more in memory and longing. My adventurous spirit is not really present.
I stopped off at a little Beach in a very small coastal neighborhood and hung out for a while, watching the Sun go down.
Had I been allowed to stay the night there, I probably would have, but it was not allowed, so I kept on driving… and driving… and driving.
I thought it was possible to drive all the way around the Coromandel, so I figured I would drive until I was able to find a place to stop for the night, but I realized when I got to Fletcher Bay that I could go no further. The road ended at a campground I guess I could have paid for a night at the campground, but there’s that part of me that’s like, “No, that’s what I bought this van for, so I didn’t have to pay for campsites.” 😅
So… I didn’t stop for the night there. I ended up driving all the way back down the coast, seeing Australian possums absolutely everywhere (I even pulled over and walked up to one of the possums that was in the tree and gave his tail a little tug–echoes of the raccoon nudge at Martin’s Cove in Nevada. 🙃)
I ended up driving all the way back to the same place that I stayed at last night, that little turnout on a bend in the windy road (I think it was Port Charles Rd).
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 