Thursday, December 07, 2006
Ok. So.
I currently have about four hours to kill, so I'm just emailing everyone because I have nothing else to do, really, because this town is small and I'm not hungry yet - although I should probably eat before dark because that's when everything likes to close...
ANYWAY.
Yeah, I decided to not do the Glacier Hike... at first, we weren't going to do it today because the weather report said it was going to rain and hail... so then we were going to do it tomorrow. And then I saw what it all entailed... and it reminded me a lot of what we did at Tongariro, so I decided it wasn't for me and passed... so Tanya went today and I've got the rest of the afternoon to do whatver. I just finished my book last night, too... and I'm fairly certain I didn't bring any others with me to the South Island... so ... since I'm saving some money by not doing to hike, I might just splurge a little and buy a new book. Or I can just read Pride and Prejudice, which is what Tanya was reading... but I'm really not in the mood for Jane Austen at the moment... It was kind of funny, we were camping last night and I was reading my murder mystery and I get scared pretty easily, so I kept thinking there would be an axe murderer coming for us in the middle of the night. Instead, we got possums. I woke up to a possum climbing around on the top of our tent. At first, I thought it was "just a rat," but then realised what it was and started to freak out a little... I mean, the possums [is it possums or possum?] in America are ferocious little devils, right? Like, you don't touch them no matter what... and then I started thinking about The Princess Bride and the huge rat things that they have in the forest and how the possums are JUST LIKE THAT AND OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO DIE. But then the possum slid off the roof of the tent and I relaxed a little. Until I began thinking of how it was going to steal our shoes -
[I guess I should stop here and explain the set up of our tent... Ok, so, we have a four person tent. We orginally bought it with Rob, so a four person tent for three people wasn't too bad. It's really big and roomy... Tanya {who had the nickname of Amazon Woman in high school} can stand up in it at the middle, so it's not like the possum was right on our heads... And there are two parts to the tent... the inner, less water proof part that you sleep in; and the outer, wind/water proof layer that goes over the inner part. This outer part, it doesn't close all the way against the outside elements, but the inner part does - once all the zippers are zipped, nothing is getting in or out unless you unzip it. The outside is just a cover to protect against the rain and wind and is sort of open at the bottom where it meets the ground. Ok. Back to the story.]
because they were sitting in between the inner and outer parts of the tent so they could dry [which never happened, by the way...], and the possum could get to it... and I assumed that the possum would steal things because it's kind of like a rat and rats steal things. Sooo [and Tanya's sleeping through alllll of this] I slowly unzip the door, but just the part that doesn't open the screen so just in case there is a possum outside, I have at least a small layer between it and me... and I don't see anything moving, so I zip that back up and unzip the actual door and quickly reach out and grab our shoes and the tent bag, all the while believing the possum was going to jump out at any minute and bite my hand off. But it didn't. I safely get the shoes inside and quickly zip the tent back up and start to relax again. And then I start thinking, what if it starts to chew its way in? WHAT THEN? What do we do then, Dragon???? {Ok, so no one except Gabe will really get that last part, but it's pretty funny... It's not really my story to tell, but I will tell it later if you ask me}, so I lay reallllllly still and stop breathing so I can hear what's going on outside. All of a sudden, I hear something walking on the mat [that's connected to the inner part and not the outer part] right by our heads {the tent has two doors, front and back, duh} and I almost had a heart attack. THE POSSUMS ARE ATTACKING! So I don't move. Actually, I wait a beat, and then start shaking Tanya awake, telling her we're surrounded by possums, which wasn't totally true... I really only think there was one the whole time, but I was freaked out, and I ask her what we should do. She says something about not going outside til morning [at which point I start thinking, "You hear that, bladder? NOT GOING OUTSIDE TIL MORNING SO DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT."] and that they'll be gone by then. She goes back to sleep and I see the possum start to climb up the pole of the tent. I don't know if it was inside or outside. Actually, now that I think about it, it had to have been on the outside because the velcro that holds the outer part to the poles on the inside was still velcroed and it would have come undone, I'm sure, if a possum were crawling around on it... Anyway, so I just see this possum head illuminated by the moonlight right above my head and try to think rational thoughts [and not how he can claw his way through the tent and eat us alive...]. So finally, I realxed enough to tell myself not to worry about it, if he starts eating his way through the tent, we'll hear it, and that would be when we could freak out or do something about it. So I fell back to sleep. And all was well.
So yeah... I decided not to the the Glacier Hike. But I went with the hiking group up to the yellow danger ropes [where they actually start their hike ... there's this walk from the carpark to the glacier, actually you never get that close to it, but anyway, and then you get to the yellow ropes and that's as far as you can go and the hikers with guides can start their journey] and then turned back. I actually didn't spend as much time walking to the ropes as everyone else does because one of the guides said I could follow them and hear the stories and then just turn back when the time came, so I got to take a short cut through the rainforest {yes, rainforest and a glacier... only three glaciers in the world are next to rainforests. Two in NZ - Franz Josef and Fox - and one in Patagonia, which is in Argentina or some place in South America}. However, on my way back to the shortcut, I decide to take pictures and take my time and just enjoy the pretty scenery and stuff... and I get 7/8s of the way to the shortcut when I realise I don't have the car keys. I check, double check, and triple check all of my pockets, but I knew full well that they had been in the pocket my camera had been in... and I kept taking my camera out of my pocket, so there was ample opportunity for my keys to fall out. Soooo I start backtracking, trying to remember exactly which way I came so I can re-trace my steps and find the keys - which, thankfully, have a yellow tag on them which would stand out against the grey rocks. I start to panic a little bit... thinking of how ALL of our stuff is now locked in a car... how if someone else finds the key, they have access to ALL of our stuff ... that I'm gonna have to pay the car company some more money to get another key/have the car unlocked. But then I start seeing a bunch of people coming back from where I was, and I start asking them if they've found any keys.... and lo and behold, someone says an older lady had found some keys. Do you ever have one of those moments in life when you've just been so devastated by some stupid move you've made only to get that moment of relief, that one moment where everything in the world seems so much brighter and more colorful just because your mistake has been rectified in a very easy manner, such as someone finding your keys for you so you don't have to scrounge about the entire glacial floor looking for a small yellow key? Yeah. That's what I felt. I finally find the woman who found it, and start thanking her a billion times and start walking back to the carpark with her. She's from the UK and will be travelling for six months and just went to Fiji {but in June... so ... yeah ... she didn't really know about the coup when I asked her about it.} and will be going to Australia for a bit and yeah. So we finally get to my shortcut but she was wearing not hiking boots and the short cut kind of goes through water, so she kept going the way she originally came. I ended up getting to the carpark just as the people who told me someone had found the keys were... so it was a pretty fast shortcut. It takes about 45 minutes to get to the ropes, I guess... Anyway. That doesn't matter. What does matter is that I have car keys.
I still don't know what I'm going to do. If I keep typing for another fifteen minutes, then I still have about three hours until Tanya's tour is over... I don't think I can eat for three hours. And I think I'm just going to c&p this into my blog...
So tonight, we're driving to Queenstown. We return the car on the 10th, I think... And we're going to stop at Puzzling World and have tons of fun there. And we are horseback riding in Qtown... I'm really excited about that. We have a few days in Qtown, but I'm not sure what else we're doing. We'll probably see Casino Royale... And then we're supposed to go to Invercargill [and see penguins! We actually saw two little blue penguins when we were taking the aquataxi to awaroa, and lots of seals!] and on to Dunedin. From Dunedin, we fly back to Auckland and from Auckland, to LA. I have, at least, a long lay over in Auckland, and Tanya might too, so we're going to call our friend from work, Jess, and see if she'll come have lunch with us at the airport.
As a condition of us coming back to the States early, we should be showered with food. We have decided this. Lots of good, yummy food. Tanya likes enchilladas, but I told her there are restaurants for that. So we're going for anything that's been grilled on the barbecue now. And maybe some mashed potatoes. I can't wait to come home to real ketchup. They have Heinz here, but only at the grocery stores, really. And if you ask for ketchup at take away places, they charge you for it, and it's Wattie's tomato sauce, not ketchup. :P Tomato sauce is really gross, but after eating it with chips for four months, it's not so bad... but it's nowhere near as good as Heinz [which, oddly enough, owns Wattie's]. And Tanya wants to make breakfast one morning. She has a dish called Scrapple that involves sausage, cornbread, and apple butter, but I don't really know what it is. She tried making it here, but the sausage is too flour-y and the cornbread didn't come out, so she didn't even finish making it. It sounds interesting, though.
I kind of want one of the local birds to bother us. The kea are supposed to be really smart and try to get food from people, but we haven't run into any yet. Apparently, they attacked the other groups that came during the semester while they were here... well, not attacked, really, but persistantly tried to obtain a sandwich through the windshield. We've also run into some weird birds. There is a duck that sounds like a cat [at least, we assume it is the one that this girl Aya was talking about... it made really weird, non-duck sounds and I guess it could be considered a cat-like sound], and then we were approached by a flightless bird yesterday when we stopped to eat lunch at a scenic look out. We gave it some crackers.
By the way, after I come home, I don't want to eat another peanut butter and jelly sandwich for a really long time.
Ok. I guess that's about it, for now. I'm getting hungry and I'm going to go feed myself something warm.
I can't wait to see you all!!!
I love and miss you,
Chelcie
I currently have about four hours to kill, so I'm just emailing everyone because I have nothing else to do, really, because this town is small and I'm not hungry yet - although I should probably eat before dark because that's when everything likes to close...
ANYWAY.
Yeah, I decided to not do the Glacier Hike... at first, we weren't going to do it today because the weather report said it was going to rain and hail... so then we were going to do it tomorrow. And then I saw what it all entailed... and it reminded me a lot of what we did at Tongariro, so I decided it wasn't for me and passed... so Tanya went today and I've got the rest of the afternoon to do whatver. I just finished my book last night, too... and I'm fairly certain I didn't bring any others with me to the South Island... so ... since I'm saving some money by not doing to hike, I might just splurge a little and buy a new book. Or I can just read Pride and Prejudice, which is what Tanya was reading... but I'm really not in the mood for Jane Austen at the moment... It was kind of funny, we were camping last night and I was reading my murder mystery and I get scared pretty easily, so I kept thinking there would be an axe murderer coming for us in the middle of the night. Instead, we got possums. I woke up to a possum climbing around on the top of our tent. At first, I thought it was "just a rat," but then realised what it was and started to freak out a little... I mean, the possums [is it possums or possum?] in America are ferocious little devils, right? Like, you don't touch them no matter what... and then I started thinking about The Princess Bride and the huge rat things that they have in the forest and how the possums are JUST LIKE THAT AND OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO DIE. But then the possum slid off the roof of the tent and I relaxed a little. Until I began thinking of how it was going to steal our shoes -
[I guess I should stop here and explain the set up of our tent... Ok, so, we have a four person tent. We orginally bought it with Rob, so a four person tent for three people wasn't too bad. It's really big and roomy... Tanya {who had the nickname of Amazon Woman in high school} can stand up in it at the middle, so it's not like the possum was right on our heads... And there are two parts to the tent... the inner, less water proof part that you sleep in; and the outer, wind/water proof layer that goes over the inner part. This outer part, it doesn't close all the way against the outside elements, but the inner part does - once all the zippers are zipped, nothing is getting in or out unless you unzip it. The outside is just a cover to protect against the rain and wind and is sort of open at the bottom where it meets the ground. Ok. Back to the story.]
because they were sitting in between the inner and outer parts of the tent so they could dry [which never happened, by the way...], and the possum could get to it... and I assumed that the possum would steal things because it's kind of like a rat and rats steal things. Sooo [and Tanya's sleeping through alllll of this] I slowly unzip the door, but just the part that doesn't open the screen so just in case there is a possum outside, I have at least a small layer between it and me... and I don't see anything moving, so I zip that back up and unzip the actual door and quickly reach out and grab our shoes and the tent bag, all the while believing the possum was going to jump out at any minute and bite my hand off. But it didn't. I safely get the shoes inside and quickly zip the tent back up and start to relax again. And then I start thinking, what if it starts to chew its way in? WHAT THEN? What do we do then, Dragon???? {Ok, so no one except Gabe will really get that last part, but it's pretty funny... It's not really my story to tell, but I will tell it later if you ask me}, so I lay reallllllly still and stop breathing so I can hear what's going on outside. All of a sudden, I hear something walking on the mat [that's connected to the inner part and not the outer part] right by our heads {the tent has two doors, front and back, duh} and I almost had a heart attack. THE POSSUMS ARE ATTACKING! So I don't move. Actually, I wait a beat, and then start shaking Tanya awake, telling her we're surrounded by possums, which wasn't totally true... I really only think there was one the whole time, but I was freaked out, and I ask her what we should do. She says something about not going outside til morning [at which point I start thinking, "You hear that, bladder? NOT GOING OUTSIDE TIL MORNING SO DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT."] and that they'll be gone by then. She goes back to sleep and I see the possum start to climb up the pole of the tent. I don't know if it was inside or outside. Actually, now that I think about it, it had to have been on the outside because the velcro that holds the outer part to the poles on the inside was still velcroed and it would have come undone, I'm sure, if a possum were crawling around on it... Anyway, so I just see this possum head illuminated by the moonlight right above my head and try to think rational thoughts [and not how he can claw his way through the tent and eat us alive...]. So finally, I realxed enough to tell myself not to worry about it, if he starts eating his way through the tent, we'll hear it, and that would be when we could freak out or do something about it. So I fell back to sleep. And all was well.
So yeah... I decided not to the the Glacier Hike. But I went with the hiking group up to the yellow danger ropes [where they actually start their hike ... there's this walk from the carpark to the glacier, actually you never get that close to it, but anyway, and then you get to the yellow ropes and that's as far as you can go and the hikers with guides can start their journey] and then turned back. I actually didn't spend as much time walking to the ropes as everyone else does because one of the guides said I could follow them and hear the stories and then just turn back when the time came, so I got to take a short cut through the rainforest {yes, rainforest and a glacier... only three glaciers in the world are next to rainforests. Two in NZ - Franz Josef and Fox - and one in Patagonia, which is in Argentina or some place in South America}. However, on my way back to the shortcut, I decide to take pictures and take my time and just enjoy the pretty scenery and stuff... and I get 7/8s of the way to the shortcut when I realise I don't have the car keys. I check, double check, and triple check all of my pockets, but I knew full well that they had been in the pocket my camera had been in... and I kept taking my camera out of my pocket, so there was ample opportunity for my keys to fall out. Soooo I start backtracking, trying to remember exactly which way I came so I can re-trace my steps and find the keys - which, thankfully, have a yellow tag on them which would stand out against the grey rocks. I start to panic a little bit... thinking of how ALL of our stuff is now locked in a car... how if someone else finds the key, they have access to ALL of our stuff ... that I'm gonna have to pay the car company some more money to get another key/have the car unlocked. But then I start seeing a bunch of people coming back from where I was, and I start asking them if they've found any keys.... and lo and behold, someone says an older lady had found some keys. Do you ever have one of those moments in life when you've just been so devastated by some stupid move you've made only to get that moment of relief, that one moment where everything in the world seems so much brighter and more colorful just because your mistake has been rectified in a very easy manner, such as someone finding your keys for you so you don't have to scrounge about the entire glacial floor looking for a small yellow key? Yeah. That's what I felt. I finally find the woman who found it, and start thanking her a billion times and start walking back to the carpark with her. She's from the UK and will be travelling for six months and just went to Fiji {but in June... so ... yeah ... she didn't really know about the coup when I asked her about it.} and will be going to Australia for a bit and yeah. So we finally get to my shortcut but she was wearing not hiking boots and the short cut kind of goes through water, so she kept going the way she originally came. I ended up getting to the carpark just as the people who told me someone had found the keys were... so it was a pretty fast shortcut. It takes about 45 minutes to get to the ropes, I guess... Anyway. That doesn't matter. What does matter is that I have car keys.
I still don't know what I'm going to do. If I keep typing for another fifteen minutes, then I still have about three hours until Tanya's tour is over... I don't think I can eat for three hours. And I think I'm just going to c&p this into my blog...
So tonight, we're driving to Queenstown. We return the car on the 10th, I think... And we're going to stop at Puzzling World and have tons of fun there. And we are horseback riding in Qtown... I'm really excited about that. We have a few days in Qtown, but I'm not sure what else we're doing. We'll probably see Casino Royale... And then we're supposed to go to Invercargill [and see penguins! We actually saw two little blue penguins when we were taking the aquataxi to awaroa, and lots of seals!] and on to Dunedin. From Dunedin, we fly back to Auckland and from Auckland, to LA. I have, at least, a long lay over in Auckland, and Tanya might too, so we're going to call our friend from work, Jess, and see if she'll come have lunch with us at the airport.
As a condition of us coming back to the States early, we should be showered with food. We have decided this. Lots of good, yummy food. Tanya likes enchilladas, but I told her there are restaurants for that. So we're going for anything that's been grilled on the barbecue now. And maybe some mashed potatoes. I can't wait to come home to real ketchup. They have Heinz here, but only at the grocery stores, really. And if you ask for ketchup at take away places, they charge you for it, and it's Wattie's tomato sauce, not ketchup. :P Tomato sauce is really gross, but after eating it with chips for four months, it's not so bad... but it's nowhere near as good as Heinz [which, oddly enough, owns Wattie's]. And Tanya wants to make breakfast one morning. She has a dish called Scrapple that involves sausage, cornbread, and apple butter, but I don't really know what it is. She tried making it here, but the sausage is too flour-y and the cornbread didn't come out, so she didn't even finish making it. It sounds interesting, though.
I kind of want one of the local birds to bother us. The kea are supposed to be really smart and try to get food from people, but we haven't run into any yet. Apparently, they attacked the other groups that came during the semester while they were here... well, not attacked, really, but persistantly tried to obtain a sandwich through the windshield. We've also run into some weird birds. There is a duck that sounds like a cat [at least, we assume it is the one that this girl Aya was talking about... it made really weird, non-duck sounds and I guess it could be considered a cat-like sound], and then we were approached by a flightless bird yesterday when we stopped to eat lunch at a scenic look out. We gave it some crackers.
By the way, after I come home, I don't want to eat another peanut butter and jelly sandwich for a really long time.
Ok. I guess that's about it, for now. I'm getting hungry and I'm going to go feed myself something warm.
I can't wait to see you all!!!
I love and miss you,
Chelcie
// posted by Chelcie @ 5:01 PM 
