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