(written on the 25th from notes)
Oh my goodness my goodness! 🥳🎉🥳
But I’ll get to that. 🙃
I started off the morning trying to put first things first, chatting with the Big Guy and listening to another one of my favorite chapters in The Book of Mormon.
I then spent a good long time dealing with a mess that someone else had left on the beach, having started a fire at some unknown point and having burnt all sorts of stuff that shouldn’t be burnt… plastic, metal, glass…
It was a mess and a hazard, but I combed through the rocks and sand for probably an hour pulling trash and gazillions of shards of glass out.
There was a busted reusable grocery bag stuck in one of the plants on the beach, and I used that as a container to hold the glass, the broken pieces of pottery or ceramics or whatever it was, the pieces of metal and all the trash.
Then I brought it down to the public trash containers in the car park area, but the containers were so overloaded that there was trash spilling out on the ground, and people had put their trash bags next to the trash cans, so there was no place to put the dangerous mess leftovers.
So I grabbed a black trash bag from TGK and started removing all of the recyclables that had been put in the trash bin, hoping to make enough room to put in all the broken bits of glass and what not.
Unfortunately, there still wasn’t enough room. 🙃
So I grabbed another trash bag and started filling the spilled over trash from the trash cans into that trash bag. Then I grabbed my half full trash bag from my van and it the rest of the way with trash from the bins and surrounding the bins.
By the time I was finished, I’d gotten all of the trash picked up from around the bins, the dangerous trash inside one of the plastic bins, and had all of the bags nestled next to the bins ready to be taken out, including my bag of trash, which I didn’t feel so bad leaving there since I filled half of it up with the mess that was already there and spent so much time cleaning up the beach and the area. 🙃
It was nice and neat when I left, though there’s probably a pretty good chance that it’s not going to stay that way. 😕
I was surprised when I noticed a garbage truck had pulled into the car park, but it left while I was still cleaning up the place and without picking up any of the trash or emptying the bins. 🤔
Maybe that wasn’t his route, and he was just pausing for a break?
🤷
My grocery stores were lower than probably any point on my trip since my very first week, so I decided it was worth driving back up to Timaru to the Pak ‘N Save, as the grocery savings would far exceed the perhaps $5 in gas it would cost me to backtrack.
I figured while I was there, I would try and run some other errands as well, hoping to perhaps find a junkyard to get parts for TGK or find that the local parts store carried what I needed.
On the way in, I noticed a building with a little sign saying that they paid top dollar for possum furs.
The country has been trying to eradicate, or at least significantly decrease, the population of the invasive species, and they used to give bounties for them, but then I guess people started breeding them in order to make money from the bounties which actually ended up increasing the population as I guess they got back into areas where they had previously been eradicated. 😅
From what I understand, they are a problem because they feed on native critters and also are carriers of bovine tuberculosis, and there’s a pretty hefty cattle industry in New Zealand.
Anyway, figured I’d stop by the place, just out of curiosity, on my way back out of town, my first stop being back to the recycling center to get rid of everything that I had just brought with me from cleaning up the trash area at the beach.
Gratefully, it was easily disposed of and barely off the route to my other errands.
My next stop was over to the local Woolworths, The high-end grocery store that usually has plastic bag recycling, but unfortunately, they didn’t offer it at this one, so it was off to Pak ‘N Save, where I spent a very long time buying groceries, as I was set on once again removing the crap out of my diet and eating at least decently well.
No chips. No soda. No cookies. No Candy (to be transparent, it had been a while since I bought cookies or candy, as I’d already been trying to do at least a little bit better). No… ice cream.
😶
I bought fresh fruit and canned fruit and frozen fruit. I bought more beans to go with my canned seasoned tomatoes.
I bought more tortillas and more cheese.
I bought more peanut butter but no jelly, buying honey instead. That might not be any better than jelly, but I’ve heard that honey can actually be good for you, in moderation, of course.
I should probably read about that a bit more. I think I’ve done the research in the past and didn’t eat honey, but that was also because I was trying to avoid sugar, which… I want to get back to…
I didn’t buy any unnatural sugary things. 🙃
I didn’t buy water. Normally, I keep myself hydrated with diet soda. 😅 But there was supposedly a place nearby that I could fill up my water, as I hate buying water.
Unfortunately, when I got there, I found that wasn’t the case. The water fountain had a sign next to it saying it wasn’t drinkable. 😕
It was kind of funny though. When I was at Pak ‘N Save, a couple of girls who arrived after I did I recognized from the beach where I’d been cleaning up trash, and then when I got to the park where the water fountain was, those same girls were there. 🙃
So I still didn’t have any water, but whatever. I’ve gotten enough for the next couple of days, and if I end up having to buy some, it’s not the end of the world.
I remembered to check to see if there was a Repco in town, and there was, so I headed over to check to see if they had a neutral safety switch, and they didn’t.
Gosh, I chose this van because there are common in New Zealand, perhaps the most common petrol-powered van. Most of them are even the generation as mine. You’d think that being so popular, there’d be parts for them, but both parts I’ve tried to get so far have been unavailable–no brake master cylinder and no neutral safety switch (I guess they call them neutral start switches or inhibitor switches).
😕
Just down the road, however, there happened to be a Toyota dealership with a parts department, so I decided to swing by and ask them. The guy was super helpful, and he gave me a printout of the part numbers and the prices but said that there currently weren’t any available in the country.
😶
The challenge of getting parts is definitely one good reason to own Japanese: At least you won’t have to fix them very often. 🙃
The guy at the Toyota parts counter suggested that I might go to the junkyard that I had found earlier in the day and had been planning to go to, though he warned me that from what he understood, the recent ownership change had led to a significant downtick in service, as he said they were focusing more on chopping cars up and shipping pieces out of the country.
But there was a junkyard, and I was far away from Christchurch, so I figured I had better avail myself of the opportunity, so I headed over.
I chatted with a nice man behind the counter who said they had multiple vehicles of my model and generation in the back, and so I pulled off my neutral safety switch for them to match up with and I also asked to buy a used battery given the battery issues I’d been having.
He got me a battery from 2024, which was pretty good, and a fair bit larger than the one I currently had in the van, and that was what I was hoping for (to get a battery with more cranking amps and additional amp hours of usable energy). To top it off, it was only $70 New Zealand, which is like $40 American, so… That wasn’t bad at all. That’s about 80% less than buying that same battery new from Repco.
🙏
The guy behind the counter told me that if the neutral safety switch didn’t work, then I could go ahead and bring it back, so I walked right out to my van, put the new one on, and to my disappointment, found that I had exactly the same issue with the replacement part as I had with my old one.
What that told me was that it was significantly more likely that the issue was unrelated to my mutual safety switch, as statistically, it wasn’t likely that two parts would have the same issue.
My choice of using probabilities and statistics to make decisions would later be proven questionable… but I’ll get there. 🙃
Gratefully, the junkyard people went ahead and refunded me the cost of the neutral safety switch, despite being well aware that the fact that my vehicle wasn’t repaired with the new part did not mean that their part that they had removed themselves to get me was faulty.
They’ll be getting a great review from me for treating me so well. 🙏
I put my neutral safety switch back in, but I had to bend the crap out of my battery cables in order to get them to fit over the larger battery posts of my new battery because they were designed for a teeny tiny battery with tiny battery posts. 🙃
So I sort of bent them apart and then wedged them on in a way that is completely unreliable. 😆
But the van fired right up, so I know the battery is good, and it’s bigger, so it’ll have the power to start this engine even when it’s on the decline.
I decided to text my brother Richard to add a brain to the mix that’s smarter than my own (despite having less experience than I in the automotive field), to bounce the issue off of.
He suggested a video call, so I called him via Google Meet once I’d turned off my SIM (out of an abundance of caution to make sure that Google Meet was using my data from my internet instead of my cell phone signal from my cell plan).
I walked him through the situation and the symptoms and everything, and he made some suggestions and what not, and then while we were talking, I remembered a thought that I had had in the past that I had forgotten about that there might be a good chance that this issue was caused by me when I was messing with the electrical problem I had with the window in the driver’s side sliding door.
It seemed like either an issue with what I had done before, or a blown fuse (and I’d already checked fuses before), or a short with the stereo system/aftermarket wiring.
While talking to him, I had noticed that I was passing that little place with the possum sign, so for the majority of our conversation, I sat parked in the parking lot of the wool shop (the place that also buys possum fur).
After basically concluding that my next step with my van was going to be to start removing trim panels in order to access the wiring harnesses that I had been working with in that previous repair, I bid my brother farewell and wandered into the wool place to ask about possum furs.
After chatting with the guy, the gist is basically this: it’s $100 ($60ish American) paid per kilogram of possum fur (the seller doing the fur removal), which he said is going to take about 10 possums. So… definitely not a large enough incentive for people to make the eradication of the invasive possums financially feasible as an income stream.
Despite there being an invasive species causing issues, they’re cute little buggers, so it would be hard to kill them anyway. 😕
Since I’d used up my available nights for the month at the beach I just stayed at, I needed to find a new place to go, and I also wanted to find a place with a decent little parking lot and some shade to hopefully spend some time tearing my van back apart in the hopes of being able to figure out and fix the transmission issue that I was now leaning toward having been caused by my own error or negligence.
As I was driving south, I passed what looked like a perfect little spot right before the beautiful Waitaki River (a very wide braided river, flowing with the beautiful blue/turquoise glacier water). So I turned around, went back across the bridge, and parked in the shade next to the bathrooms of the little campground area and got to work.
Off came the the step panel (which required removing a screw from my storage compartment frame, which required disassembling and fixing my little ratcheting screwdriver that had apparently somehow fallen apart just… sitting there 🤔, which required taking it completely apart in order to understand how it worked before figuring out how to put it back together to make a functional tool again 🙃. But I succeeded.
Then off came the glove box and the passenger kick panel, and the passenger lower side panel, and the passenger b pillar panel, exposing a bunch of wiring.
Off came the electrical connector that connects the b pillar to the sliding door.
But… all the wiring looked great. 😶
I had a vague recollection of pulling on a bunch of wires to get rid of them, and I figured that that must have been where I caused the issue, but I couldn’t find anything of concern.
The wiring harness looked beautiful. 🙃
I did see some wiring that must have gone to an external stereo amplifier at some point, so that must have been what I was yanking out last time?
But that wouldn’t have been related…
The wiring for the rear camera and the reverse lights actually went through along the a-pillar into the ceiling between the headliner and the top of the van itself.
Hmmm…
So then I started removing the trim panels from the rear hatch, the access panels for the reverse lights themselves, inspecting the wiring, and finding no problem with the wiring whatsoever, other than a few broken copper strands, but nothing to cause the issues that I was dealing with.
So I kept removing trim panels from the rear hatch until every single chim panel was off, so I could follow the wires where they went, and nothing. I couldn’t find issues anywhere.
So I grabbed my multimeter and decided to go back through all the fuses, starting with the two fuse boxes underneath the hood, finding every fuse fully functional. Then I went to the fuses on the driver side, checking every fuse, and finding every single one fully functional.
Then I went to the fuse box underneath the passenger side of the dashboard, and I started checking all the fuses, they were all good. But there were three fuses that I couldn’t reach with my multimeter to test, requiring me to actually remove the fuses to test them.
And now we come to what I mentioned before about making decisions based on probabilities and statistics:
I think I actually remember checking the fuses before but not being able to reach a few of them (just like this time) and thinking that the odds would be absolutely tiny for someone to go through four different fuse boxes, with every single fuse completely fine, only to find that the issue was with one of the last few checked.
Indeed, that would be highly improbable.
But exactly the reality. 😆
I grabbed my needle nose pliers, pulled out the first fuse, and it was fine, pulled out the second fuse, and it was blown.
😲
I went to my engine compartment fuse box, stealing an equivalent fuse from the dome-light slot, slipped it in the T/M fuse slot underneath the passenger dash, turned my key, and eureka!
My PRND2L gauge was lit up and actually showed what gear I was in!
🥳
I checked my reverse lights, and they were both working!
🥳
Then I reinstalled my stereo system, and my backup camera was working, too!
🥳
(and then I re-removed it because I don’t want my stereo system glowing at me all the time, having to continually turn it off, so it doesn’t glare in my face at night. 🙃)
After everything was said and done, having looked at all the wiring, understanding where it all went, I finally figured out what happened (at least I’m pretty sure this is what happened):
I had gotten fed up with my large stereo screen lighting up every time I turned the key on. There was no way to just simply set the screen to stay off and only be on when I wanted it to be on. No, I had to turn it off every single time.
That gets annoying when you’re turning your vehicle on and off over and over and over again.
I also don’t really ever listen to music, and I don’t know the radio stations here anyway, and I never owned a vehicle with a backup camera, so it was no loss to lose a backup camera, so I’d simply removed my entire stereo, figuring I’d put it back if the people I sold it to when I left New Zealand wanted it.
Well, because the stereo doubled as a backup camera, there was a wire that was spliced into the reverse lights wire all the way back at the back hatch, but when I disconnected all of the wires from the back of my stereo, that connection at the stereo was bare.
So when I shoved all of the wires from the back of the stereo into the dash to get out of my way, so I could use the stereo compartment as a little storage compartment, that connector end must have been pressed up against the metal of the internal dashboard frame, at which point, as soon as I set the gear shifter to reverse, it would have shorted out against the frame and blown the fuse.
Boom.
And I’ve been driving it that way for the last… two or three months. 😆
Had I not relied on probabilities, which I just about never do (one of the great ironies of this circumstance, as I usually doggedly check every last minute possibility before moving on), I would have found the blown fuse right away and had a functional PRND2L gauge, functional reverse lights (to be fair, I didn’t even know they weren’t working until just a few days ago 🙃), and most importantly, I would have had lower gears to help me more safely drive down steep winding hills!
Oh well 🙃
The issue is more resolved!!! And when I drove out of the parking lot in L gear, it functioned as it should!
🪇🎊🥳🎉🥳🎊🪇
(oh, it probably goes without saying, but I put everything back together. Or at least… most of it. 🙃
While I was in the parking lot working on my van, a young couple asked me if I knew if the place was a freedom camping spot, because their version of CamperMate said that it was. Mine… didn’t. 🤔
I told them about the place that I had stayed at further north, and they were heading north, so they headed off that direction, though I don’t know if they’re going to stay at the same place I did.
I was also able to dispose of the contents of Little John. 😁
It was a very successful stop all the way around.
🙃
I did want to get pictures of the beautiful River, but there weren’t any shoulders on the bridge, and I just didn’t have sufficient desire to turn back around, go back to the parking lot I’d just come from, and then find my way down to the river to take pictures.
Little boy ready to move on. 🙃
From there, I headed south, passing through the larger-than-expected town of Oamaru before arriving at the freedom-camping spot on the ocean just south of Kakanui, where I continued cranking out journal posts, ate dinner, snapped some pictures of the coast, veged out for a bit, and crashed for the night.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 