(written on the 10th of December from notes taken previously)
Woke up to the view of the lake out in front of me. I had parked in a little dirt turnaround spot off the main dirt road that separated the day use area from the camping area, or something like that.
Beautiful place to be.
The wind was blowing pretty strongly from across the lake toward me, ducks swimming around, and even some black swans.
I spent part of the morning trying to catch up a little bit on my journal, taking notes and whatnot for recent days gone by.
I’m so far behind and getting the actual entries themselves written. 😅
I stayed there for a little while, sort of forcing myself to slow down a little bit, but I often come back to the same challenge: I don’t want to waste my daylight hours catching up on my journal, when that’s the perfect thing to be doing at night after the sun is down, and wandering around this beautiful country has concluded for the day.
The problem is that by the time I get to whoever it is that I’m going to be staying for the night, I’m tired and want to veg instead of writing in my journal.
It’s been so long since I was good at writing in journal every single day. At one point, I did it without fail, no matter how the day went, no matter what time of day it was, whether I’d work a 16-hour day or enjoy the leisurely day, I always wrote in my journal before putting my head to my pillow.
So much self discipline that I’ve lost.
It’s going to take so much effort to get it back.
Had planned to go to Napier today to Fill up my water bottles and do some grocery shopping. There was a waterfall that I wanted to check out on the way there, but unfortunately, as it seems to be with just about everything in this area of New Zealand, it was closed I don’t know if it was closed because of all the road construction they were doing right in that area with construction vehicles in what I think was the parking lot for the trailhead, or if it was another waterfall that had the track damaged from cyclone Gabrielle back only a month after I left New Zealand last time.
After a fair bit of waiting in construction traffic (on windy roads through hills about the size of what would be considered mountains in Arkansas), the kind of construction traffic where you have either a person with a stop sign on each end or a stop light on each end and then only one lane is available, and those going one way take turns with those going the other way, I finally made it through the traffic and into the outskirts of Napier.
I realized that for some reason my AC wasn’t working very well. When I was stopped, the AC was blowing what felt like ambient temperature, so I was a little worried that maybe my fans weren’t working properly, but the vehicle wasn’t overheating, so the radiator fan must have been working fine, I deduced, which meant it had to be a two fan system.
I pulled over to a little grassy parking spot next to a picnic table on the beach on the main highway into Napier, popped to the hood, and found both fans running seemingly fine, one much faster than the other, but both running.
🤔
I shut the engine off, and water down to the shore. The water was an exquisite turquoise color if you looked up the beach toward the sun, and sort of a light blue color if you looked down the beach toward Napier. Then if you looked out beyond the more shallow portion of the Bay closest to the shore, then it was a deep blue. Beautiful color differences. I tried to take a picture, but I just couldn’t capture the colors, and it was so bright that I couldn’t tell on my phone camera whether I had caught the colors or not.
All good. It was beautiful.
Checked my oil level because I hadn’t in a while, and gratefully, it wasn’t low, which means I guess this particular 2.4 Toyota engine, known for burning oil, doesn’t burn much if any. 🙏
Didn’t stay long at all, jumping back on the road and heading into Napier. My first stop was a public beach area that had a water fill station, where I filled up three of my empty water bottles.
While there, I noticed that the shower that functioned via pushing a button and then the button would slowly come out until the water would stop spraying was stuck in the spray position. So it was just dumping water constantly. Took me maybe a minute or so to get the little knob pulled out far enough for the water to stop.
I’ll see if I can find the contact information for the Napier district council, assuming they are the ones who take care of that.
It would probably be good if I were able to find a map of all the district council boundaries in New Zealand. 🙃.
Anyway, headed over to the Pack ‘N Save from there, stocking up on a whole bunch of food that I shouldn’t be buying and eating, because it’s just crappy food to eat (lots and lots of junk food 😅). I was supposed to do better this time… That self discipline problem again.
I wasn’t sure where I was going to go next. I had been thinking about heading into the bush to a place where there were some hot springs that the local district council had set up really large tubs, like hot tub size, that filled up with the hot spring water.
I haven’t and hard a little bit because it was a long ways in and no other way out, so you had to come back the way you came. But eventually, I decided that was where I was going to head, despite it being summer time and not quite the best time for soaking in hot springs. 🙃
It was a fairly long drive out there, and I managed to almost run my way through the stop area for construction again, poor young lady who was waving her stop sign to try and get my attention, and I was oblivious.
Would not have been good heading into the one-lane incoming traffic. 😅
Anyway, made my way along the dirt road out into the middle of nowhere in the bush, leaving behind all cell and internet signal, going through one gate, one of those ones where you need to open it, drive through, and then close it behind you, before finally arriving at the little gravel parking lot kind of midway up the tall, steep hills, surrounded by hills on all sides, and a beautiful river down in the gorge below.
Spent some time cleaning up trash. There wasn’t a lot directly visible, which was nice. 🙏
After doing a little bit of cleanup, I sat down at a picnic table with my headphones on watching some saved YouTube videos.
As I was sitting there, I noticed a man walking by, who looked at me and then said my name.
😶
I took my headphones off and he said my name again kind of in an interrogative tone.
And I was like, yes?
Then he reintroduced himself as Bernard, the father of the Belgian family I’d met at Waipu Caves!
Coincidentally, in my journal catch-up, I’d been writing about that very day with them from exactly three weeks ago.
I spent the next couple hours, or so, hanging out with them again, just chatting about where they’d been and what they’d experienced in their last 3 weeks. Julian’s parents were leaving New Zealand on Thursday, with Julian trying to figure out what he was doing next.
Crazy to run into them 3 weeks later out here in the absolute middle of nowhere, quite a ways from where we’d met
Fun, though.
Bid them a good night, snapped some pictures of the “hot tubs,” and headed off to my van to vege and then crash for the night.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 