A Dead Battery Puts a Halt on Roadtrips

Ok, here it is, finally the second installment of the New Zealand blog. So, where did I leave off?? We had just picked up the van (late, but none the less) and were finally on the road. It was great, we had some groovy driving tunes on, compliments of Snowy's wonderful roadtrip mixes, a delicious bag of homemade trail mix, and our map to get us to the first campsite. There were hardly any other cars on the road, once we finally got out of Christchurch ( a little confusing), and we were making great time. The only problem was we were making great time in the wrong direction, New Zealand doesn't have particularly clearly labeled road signs. By the time we realized our error it was about 7:30 pm, which gave us about an hour and a half to get to our campsite if we wanted to arrive with any natural light to guide us. We rolled into our campsite around ten in complete darkness. We had a book of conservation campsites, so they were all pretty cheap about $5 or $10 a night, but ours was free the first night because we were so late there was no one to pay. We turned off the "highway", which is really just two lanes, onto a long narrow road which seemed to be taking us to the middle of nowhere, and it was. We camped the first night in "the middle of nowhere" and we discovered in the morning however, that it was actually quite beautiful. After parking our van and strategically changing into pjs, we settled into our bed. We were very careful to make sure all the lights were turned off, because we didn't want to drain our battery. Snowy and I were both concerned about what we were going to do in our van with no computer or flashlights to read by (we weren't very prepared for camping), but as it turns out best friends can find lots of meaningless things to talk about. Oh, also part of not being prepared for camping meant we didn't have sleeping bags (someone, Con, was supposed to give us one but he forgot), sleeping the first night, well every night after that was the coldest I have ever been in my entire life. You might be asking why didn't they just buy a blanket the next day, many people did ask this and I told them "oh, there wasn't really anywhere to buy one, where we were was very rural", but the truth is we are just very cheap. So, anyways as I was shivering away that first night, constantly waking up, I heard at one point a very fast clicking noise that annoyed but then just stopped. I didn't think much of it until... we woke up around 10:30 about two hours later than we planned, panicked and hopped into the front seat to drive off, after turning the key in the ignition and nothing happening, I knew exactly what that annoying clicking was the night before, it was the sound of our car batteries' last effort before completely dying. My initial reaction was , "S**t, F***k," and any other profanity imaginable, but then we hoped someone there could jump us, but then we realized that most campers leave before 10:30 so there wasn't really anyone around so my reaction to that was "S**t, F***k,". We did finally find two people to jump start us, we had to literally run after them because they were on their way to go on a hike, but the jump was successful. To show our appreciation we offered them delicious homemade carrot muffins, but they were uninterested. We starting to understand why American travelers get a bad reputation.

Ok, i'm bored of writing this, I will write more tomorrow. Hopefully, you are waiting anxiously, here is a bit of a preview of what's to come tomorrow...sheep herding in a Popeye van.

Cheers,
Laura

Oz Open and the Begining of an Open Road Adventure

Snowy and I got back from NZ a little over a week ago and I have been meaning to update my blog and I have no excuse why it has taken so long, I just didn't do it. Anyways, I will first briefly give an account of working at the OZ Open. It was pretty full on for the two weeks I was working there, I worked about 60 hrs a week and did pretty much nothing outside of work. My job wasn't exactly exciting, I worked in Corporate Hospitality; this basically meant I prepared one of the dining rooms before each meal and showed the corporate guests to their seats then gave them water when they were leaving. Other people working in Corporate Hospitality actually got to work in Rod Laver Arena so they got to watch pretty much every match. So despite my job being less than thrilling, it was still an amazing experience and just being at the Open was exciting and there was a great positive energy. I also got to catch a couple of matches after work. Another bonus was that the dining room I was working in was adjacent to the practice court so I got to see some pretty impressive athletes training. The main lesson I took away from the Oz open was that Australians don't appreciate my chanting "USA USA" when Americans are victorious.

What I think is even more exciting then working at the Open, is my recent trip to NZ. The morning after the Oz Open ended Snowy and I boarded an early flight to Christchurch. We had scheduled to pick up a wicked camper, but the only catch was we had to pick it up by 4 pm NZ time (2 hrs later then Oz time). For those of you that aren't familiar with Wicked Vans, they are probably the most "basic" (and that's putting it kindly) camper van accommodation you can get. They target backpackers and I think most of their clients are 20 something boys, just guessing by the crude pictures that are painted on the sides of most vans. Anyways, our flight got in around 3 pm NZ time, and unfortunately it took about 45 mins longer to get out of the airport, with customs and such, than we had planned. We called Wicked Campers as soon as we realized we were going to be late and there was no answer, which was not a good sign; we decided the best thing we could do would be to just go to the garage and hope there was someone there late to give us our van. In the taxi on the way there we considered the very likely possibility that we may be spending the night in Christchurch, which would be very bad for a couple of reasons: 1, we are cheap and wouldn't pay for accommodation, sleeping in parks isn't that dangerous right? 2, Not getting our van would put us a whole day behind our planned driving route and 3, We had already payed for the day's rental. Luckily, to our relief their was someone at the garage when we got there, but she was not very happy to see us. When we told her we were sorry we were late and that we were there to pick up a van her exact words were " Are you F***ing kidding me", no we were not kidding. We feared that she might out of spite give us this van that had paintings of people doing some rude things to subs on the side, but we fortunately got a van with the unoffensive popeye painted on the side. We got a very quick run down of the van, like how to convert our table into a bed, where the kitchen was (our trunk), and how to change a flat tire. It was about 6 minute tutorial and we were off on the open road, well a quick stop at the grocery store and the gas station and then we were on the open road. Snowy took the first shift of driving, and the only real confusion with driving on the opposite side of the car and the opposite side of the road was that when we tried to use our turn signal the windshield wipers went on instead.
This is just the first installment of hat will prove to be a very long blog about our NZ road trip.

Cheers,
Laura