Saturday, April 17, 2010
-Days are just better that start with a workout
-Until you pick up your Spaceship Campervan and end up sobbing in misery. It is very much not as advertised. He spent a lot of time showing us how to use the “features” but its really a mini van with shit welded to it. Not thrilled. It is skuzzy and dirty. There are crumbs still from the last people just sitting on the bench….the “cooler” fits about two water bottles, and that’s all. No microwave, only a gas cooker that has to be used outside. Just miserable and decrepit. (And that was just the things we saw immediately, the end list of crap is LONG)
-But we did find a sweet market that had awesome food and produce (fresh figs!!). Went in and was super pleased. There were stations after stations of awesome. Breads, meats, veggies, meats, dips, prepared foods, desserts, everything. I would have killed to be able to shop from there every Saturday, it was fantastic. And everything was cheap and looked great. Then we sampled some humus and actually got some to go with our carrots. Had KILLER hot chocolate sample spoon. If it probably wasn’t 1000 calories, I would have totally bought a mug. Bought small, but perfect looking galas from this super cute couple. They jammed as many apples as humanly possible into the bag. 5 bucks for probably 10+ apples. Bought a ciabatta, chocolate chip bagel, and a roll for Tim. The chocolate chip bagel was followed by Tim's quote, "It's like a chocolate chip cookie and bread had sex...."
-I like the South Island a lot better. The roads are much better, wider, nicer, and the landscape, while a lot like Iowa, is also more interesting. No hills to make me want to puke, at least along the coast that we are driving along. More cute towns to look at too. More sizable than the North Island, but nothing huge.
-We pulled into the Oamaru I site and stopped in, and they closed the door right behind us. Thankfully we somewhat got our Penguin question answered. It was either go to the Free Beach where you may see one yellow eyed penguin around 4:30 (it was 4) OR pay $44, wait til 5:15 for a production of Blue Penguins at 6 where you see 60 some from an ampitheater with lights and a narration. We choose to go now, and free. Within minutes of arrival, I heard a honking from the cliff below, looked down, and BAM. Penguin about 15 feet down. Chilling.
-The drive from the Penguins to the Moertaki Boulders was gorgeous. Right at magic hour, we followed right along the beach, through rolling hills with sheep pastures on one side, glowing sky, mountains in the back, and the beach besides us. It was perfect and calming. Totally juxtaposed with our background music of Kevin Smith being vulgar as normal.
-We got to the boulders, slightly disappointing since I was expecting much bigger rocks. There were more than I expected, just a lot smaller. So strange though, perfect spheres. I guess the biggest one was the size I expected them all to be. Cool to look at, very curious as to how they are like that, especially the ones that have the weird rock looking like they were broken once and glued together, but its rock…..they all have cracks in them, and some of them have shattered apart, so I wonder how much longer they will last. Or if there is more.
-We turned around the mountain to Dunedin, and I was not expecting a city quite so huge. Later we learned that there is a major university there, but nonetheless, we kept turning around the mountain and there was more and more city everywhere you looked. Lights galore! We ate our Hell pizza and went back to the camp, got internet, and arranged the car and bedding, but it was super obnoxious and cold and complicated.
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