(written on April 7th from notes taken previously)
I was up and out by 8:30 this morning, making a beeline for Mitre 10 (yesterday’s “consequences” in full swing).
In an effort to repair the mess I made after pulling apart all the rusted metal, I bought a hammer, a chisel set, a file set, a tube of construction adhesive, a tube of clear caulk, a caulk gun, and a small sheet of stainless steel.
Then I went back in and bought some spray paint, a goldish color at least somewhat close to the color of the van.
The parking lot there probably would have been the best place to do the work, given that I would be right next to my source of tools and supplies if I needed anything more, but the parking lot was absolutely slammed, and I didn’t fancy hanging out there banging and scraping and sanding and whatnot.
So I headed over to my next stop, Warehouse Stationary, hoping to be able to create that sign I mentioned yesterday to put up at the hot spring hot tubs.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find poster board or any kind of sign-making product, but one of the employees told me to go over to the printing counter and see what they might recommend. There were a couple of ladies behind the counter who let me know that they had several different sizes and thicknesses of paper and the ability to laminate, so I decided on a particular size, I think A2 (whatever the designation, it’s roughly the equivalent to 11×17 in imperial).
The only thing I needed to do was design the sign and then send it to them as a PDF, so I downloaded Google docs, and got to work.
It was a lot more challenging than I expected, as I’m much more used to Microsoft word, but eventually, I think it might have actually taken an hour or more 😅, I managed to get the little sign designed, the PDF file sent over, and my sign printed and laminated.
I made a brief stop by the Woolworth’s dispose of my soft plastic recyclables, as I was passing by the store anyway. Pak ‘N Save was next, topping off my food stuffs.
I spent quite a long time as I wandered from place to place texting back and forth with one of the friends I met in New Zealand who was having car issues. His van, the same model and generation as mine, was making an awful racket going down the road, RPMs all over the place, but totally fine if revving the engine in park or neutral.
He was also having an issue with the battery draining down over a few days.
I did my best to walk him through some tests, focusing more on the drivability issue but also sending him a YouTube video to walk him through how to do a parasitic draw test.
Of course, there’s only so much that I can do to help over the phone, especially given that he’s pretty much a complete novice when it comes to cars.
But I did my best.
I was pleased to find that there was a recycling transfer station pretty much on the way to the hot spring tubs, so I swung by, disposed of all my other recyclables, and headed into the hills (somehow taking a wrong turn at one point and having to backtrack several kilometers despite listening to the Google Maps voice. 🤷
Had a super brief video call with my sister Heather, who was still at work late in the day. Then had a great video call with my brother Jared for a good while as I wound my way through the hills, expecting to lose reception at any moment during the call).
Last time I was at the Hot Springs, when I pulled into the dirt parking lot, mine was the only car there, and additional vehicles came and went but were few in number.
Today, the parking lot was absolutely slammed (to be fair, in this context, slammed means maybe eight cars? But… 🙃). With all the “spaces” up front taken, I ended up parking on the side of the dirt parking lot, just to the side of the walkway that goes up to the long drop.
Not really in the mood to socialize down at the tubs, I got to work trying to get something positive done with the mess I made of the roof.
But feeling fairly self conscious standing there scraping the metal with my files and banging around with my hammer, I decided to drive up the road a little bit to try and find a more private spot. I eventually pulled over on the side of the dirt road in a place where the weeds were thin and the ground solid, and I continued my efforts.
Oh, did I mention that I bought tin shears and a magnet, too? 🙃 I think I forgot about those.
I spent the next… I don’t know how many hours, tearing away pieces of metal, grinding, sanding, hammering.
At one point, I wanted to use the chisels that I had bought, so I went to look for them, but they… weren’t anywhere to be found.
I remembered hearing weird sound on my roof as I was driving away from Mitre 10 this morning… 😬
I wasn’t happy. 😒
Mostly, I was pretty upset with myself for poking my finger through the rust and causing this big mess that’s going to take multiple days of my precious time in New Zealand to resolve.
[sigh]
Sometimes I think I’m the poster boy for not learning the lessons of past mistakes. 😞
I even drove back over to the Hot Springs parking area to see if maybe they had fallen out of the van when I opened the door there, but nope. They weren’t anywhere to be found.
So I drove back over to my little spot on the side of the road where I’d been working, and I continued working on the roof until after dark.
Before taping everything up in the hopes of protecting it from the rain, it looked about like this.
That’s not just a little hole there, that’s a gaping wound with even a lengthy chunk of the curled edge gone, and part of the subframe, too.
😶
That’s… gonna let in a little rain. 😅
Boy, what a mess.
Somewhere around 8:30, I sprayed rust converter on it (another purchase item I think I forgot to mention). I had to wait four hours for the rust converge for to cure, but I needed to tape up the hole before going to bed, just in case it rained overnight.
I was so exhausted, though. I’m not exactly sure why I was so tired, but somewhere around 10:30 or 10:45, I started yawning seemingly every 15 or 30 seconds.
I was so hammered that I decided to go to sleep, setting my alarm to wake me up at the conclusion of the four hours, and then I conked out.
Gratefully, my alarm went off as it should have, and when I went to check on the roof, dew had already settled on the cold roof, and everything was wet. 😕
Gratefully, it has been sprayed, but… ugh.
I dried things off as best I could, put tape on to protect from any rain that might fall, and then tried to go back to sleep.
And tried…
And tried some more. 😒
I think I spent maybe an hour and a half trying to get my body to fall back asleep. I had been overwhelmingly exhausted before, and now I couldn’t sleep?!?!
😒
Boy I feel for all of you out there who deal with insomnia on a regular basis. Ugh. 😕
I had crashed right there on the side of the road where I’d been doing all the metal work, but not being able to sleep, I drove back to the Hot Springs parking area.
To my surprise, it was still basically full of cars. There was I think only a single open slot, which I took.
Oddly, though the car park was full, there was no one down at the hot spring tubs. 🤔
Was everyone camping in tents? Or were people off hiking somewhere? Or were they people who’d been kayaking or rafting the river and we’re going to get shuttled back to their vehicles the next day?
🤷
I didn’t mind that there was no one down at the hot spring tubs. 🙃
I went down and scoped everything out, finding the hot tubs relatively clean. 🙏
Someone had brought a brush and left it down there for people to be able to clean the sides with as needed. Many thanks to whoever that person was. There was a big brush and a little brush as well, and I spent some time cleaning the light algae film off the sides of the hot tubs, grateful it wasn’t super thick like last time.
Since I didn’t have the sign with me, I walked back up the path to my van (the hot springs are on a steep hillside), grabbed my little sign, my double-sided sticky tape stuff, and four pins I had left over from what I used to mount the lights on my headliner, and then I headed back down to the hot spring tub area.
I spent maybe the next 60 minutes doing the work necessary to securely affix the sign to the fence, using my scissors to scrape off the heavy lichen coating that covered the wood, as that wasn’t a suitable surface for even a super sticky double-sided foam tape to adhere to.
So I scraped the lichen off as best I could in order to get down to the dry wood layer, then I spent a good long time measuring and setting 12 strips of the little foam tape stuff to line up as best as I could get them to line up with the three fence pickets I was going to attach the sign to.
And then presto, literally. 🙃 After aligning the sign with the fence pickets, I did a lot pressing, hoping to get a secure a bond to the wood as I possibly could.
After significant effort, the sign felt supremely solid, such that I didn’t feel like wind was likely to be able to blow it off. That said, I didn’t know exactly how a combination of rain and wind and cold might affect it, so I wasn’t super confident.
I still had the four pins that I could use, but I worried that poking holes in the laminate might introduce water to the paper underneath after rain storms, even just little drops of it.
So I left the pins out for the time being, and decided to take a soak in the upper tub. Gratefully, for whatever reason, the water today was much cooler than it was the last time I was here. Last time, it was so hot that you couldn’t really spend much time in it. The kind of hot that leaves you with lightly burnt skin, kind of like a very light sunburn?
Or maybe just shy of that? I remember the water being far too hot to spend any time in, hurting my hands each time I would put them in to scrub. I could only stand it for a matter of seconds before having to take them out.
But this time, the temperature of the water was right on par with a regular hot tub. Hot to climb into, but not so hot that I wasn’t used to the temperature and comfortable nearly immediately.
Of course, I overheat pretty easily, so I can only stay in for so long before I’ve got to get back out.
But it wasn’t an issue being out of the water at all, as I was hampered by not a single sand fly during the entire sign posting and hot tub soaking experience.
🙏
The benefits of nightfall. 😊
After enjoying the hot spring tub for a good long time, getting in and out and in and out, and also losing a fair bit of dead skin that came off in rolls when I rubbed my skin with my hands (one more good reason to drain the tubs after every use 😆), I drained the tubs, and then took some pictures of the scene in the dark.
Unfortunately, you can’t really see the steam rising up in the cool night air.
Just before leaving, I decided to go ahead and put the four pins in the sign, pressing them hard into the wood, hard enough for the plastic on the pins to dent the laminate in, which hopefully, will keep any rain water out of the little pinholes. 🤞
It was probably just a little before 4:30 a.m. that I left the hot spring tubs car park (I guess it’s also a campground, so… it’s not just parking for the hot spring tubs), bidding a melancholic farewell to a spot I now have fond memories of.
Gratefully, there was a freedom-camping spot maybe 30 minutes down the road (Balls Clearing), where I crashed for the night, looking at my phone for the last time at 5:58 a.m.
Long day. 🙃
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 