We were sitting in the car last night, already at our destination and house for the night, but content sitting in the front seat of Connie talking for over an hour. Really we are just sitting in our home, and the front seat is our living room. Mel stuck her tongue out, and Christy looked over at it curiously and said "Whoa. You have a really big tongue." Mel pulled it back in and responded, "I know. Sometimes I forget about it." That is how insignificant our conversations have become when we are within two feet of each other 80% of every day. But then we think about all we've done the past three or four days...
Let's start with the 12th and make our way to the present. We were driving along toward the Milford Sound, had crested the mountain and been going downhill for quite a while, calmly gazing out the windows at the majestic beauty and listening to Yann Tiersen, when I pushed down on the brake and felt nothing. Pushed down again, approaching panic mode, and still nothing to slow our moving bulk of stationwagon down the narrow winding road. I instantly shot into an adrenaline pumped altered consciousness and somehow slowed the car down enough to get it to stop, threw on the hazard flashers, and came back to reality. The boys in the car behind us pulled over to make sure we were okay, and we made complete fools of ourselves when we opened the hood to take a look. "Oh yeah, the coolant is just a little brown and chunky. Don't worry about that. Brake fluid? Let's see...where's the brake fluid... uhh.. I think we'll be okay boys. You go on ahead." Erg. Christy and Mel got back in to move the car off to the side and almost went flying down the road, but luckily Christy's marvelous reflexes reached for the emergency brake. It was most definitely an emergency.
Mel and I hitched a ride to town as Team Milford and the girls stayed to slow down traffic as Team Connie. We got a ride with a foxy repair man who dropped us off at the pay phones. For the next hour, we tried to call AA and roadside assistance, but the general consensus was that we were in the middle of NOWHERE, and without a real miracle we were out of luck. Great, Connie. Nice place to pick. The roadside assistance guy said he'd call me back at the pay phone (no cell service in the middle of nowhere), so I sat on the ground in there and began this entry. Mel arrived back after trying to find help around town and was on the phone with the tow service as I looked out the window of the phone booth and saw Connie herself roll into town. It took a few seconds to register before I slapped my palm against the glass, informing Mel that CONNIE was outside. "Okay ma'am, nevermind, looks like my car just drove into town." We ran to the girls, ecstatic that our afternoon would not be spent on the side of the road waiting to be towed to the two hour away next nearest town, and they told us their series of events. I'll let Christy take over from here.
It was just like Megan said. We're all cruising along, I was in the backseat, probably absent mindedly thinking about something as significant as how large Mel's tongue is, and was snapped into reality by Megan with a fair amount of panic in her voice saying the brakes had gone out. Let the games begin.
We decided to split into Team Connie, comprised of Roxy and I, and Team Milford, which was Megan and Mel. They took off with the repair man, my teammate and I walked a little up the road where we would attempt to warn oncoming drivers that just around the corner was our little car, with her large rear end taking up half of the lane. Turns out it's really hard to communicate "Connie is stalled out ahead. Please slow down so you don't smash into our only car and home," to someone speeding past you by using just your hands. Our best attempts were something like this: Point your left hand in the Commodore's direction. Make sure to not use your thumb lest someone thinks you're attempting to hitchhike from the least conducive pick up spot in the southland. With your right hand, make the universal slow down motion, while simultaneously mouthing s-l-o-w d-o-w-n. There was also the second message for cars that started to stop to make sure we were alright: a vigorous shaking of the head while making the traditional umpire "safe" motion followed by a smile and a thumbs up. We hoped the message they would get from this would be "We've already sent two people ahead, and are probably doing the best we can in the situation, so thanks so much, but you don't need to stop and help us. Enjoy your time in Milford Sound." I would love to hear what all the various interpretations of our hand signals were. We were also being EATEN by sandflies, the nasty little midges that swarm you leaving bites that itch like the dickens and last for days.
As I was walking back to Connie to get another round of bug repellent, a road work truck pulled over to see what the fuss was all about. Roxy explained the situation to Ian (our hero, you'll see) who very quickly determined that the brakes had probably just overheated and needed to cool down but offered to check Connie out anyway. "Oh! A Holden Commodore! She'll be alright!" I'm telling you, Kiwis LOVE Connie. He gave her a test drive, declared her fit for the road, and after making us promise to always downshift instead of using the brakes while going downhill, sent us off down the hill again with him and his buddy following behind, just to be nice. We reached a place where we were stopped by a flagger for road construction and Ian got out to have a chat with the worker. Roxy and I couldn't hear what was happening, but the two of them kept pointing to us. We made sure to politely wave when they looked our direction. Ian came over and said he wanted to make sure we could meet up with the girls so we could cancel the tow truck coming for us. What a nice guy, right? Apparently he had set the man with the radio to the task of figuring out where Team Milford had gone. He returned maybe one minute later and cheerfully told us that Megan and Mel were outside the cafeteria and gave us directions to there. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand how it is that a road worker outside of Milford could get on the radio and find the location of two ordinary looking girls in one of the largest tourist destinations in the country, but he did. We gleefully (and slowly) drove down to the cafeteria. I will never in my life forget the look on Megan's face when she saw us from inside the phone booth. Roxy and I started screaming, she and Mel started screaming. Connie had done it. The Holden Commodore... yeah, she'll be alright for sure.
Alright, back to Megan.
People in this country are looking out for us. We are still unsure how and who knew we were there. After it all, we ended up spending the afternoon on a boat in the Sound, where we saw spectacular mountains rising straight from the sea and hundreds of waterfalls.
So. On to the next unfortunate event. Driving from Milford to the Catlins meant we got in pretty late, and as we were scoping out different sites to set up our tent, we embarrassingly got Connie stuck in the mud. Three of us had to get out and push her backwards down the slope, while a few amused campers listened to our shenanigans. At least they couldn't see us in the dark, unlike every car that drove past us on the side of the road on their way to Milford. Our tent poles also picked this time to break, but luckily Christy and Roxy were brilliant and strung them back together by hand. It started to rain as we were sleeping that night, getting louder over the course of a few hours until we realized we were all laying awake to a complete downpour on our not-so-waterproof tent. We woke up at 6, with our therm-a-rests/sleeping bags/clothing soaking wet. Roxy's pillow was the worst..we could ring the water out of it. We sat for at least 30 minutes in our tent puddle, half laughing and half drowning in self-pity, until we made ourselves go out into the storm and pack our drenched life into the back seat of Connie. We got a tiny little break in the rain and smiled about how everything works out, although I think that optimism might be a unique quality of our traveling team. By 6:30am, we were rolling out of the campsite. ...All right all right, so the truth is we were spinning our wheels in the mud with three girls pushing the back of the car, again. Christy got some supernatural burst of strength, similar to a mother lifting a car off her trapped child, and singlehandedly got Connie out of the mud, wearing just her underwear the entire time. I really hope someone else was watching from their tent window. It would be a shame for no one to have witnessed that, especially her legs covered in mud after it all. Hours later, we found a cafe that had opened and spewed our wet stuff all over the parking lot to dry.
Later that day (still January 14th) we left the cafe and, no joke, got a flat tire. It was NOT funny at the time, but is at least a little comical now. At that point we were on our way to Dunedin, where Roxy needed to be by 6:30 the next morning to make her flight. We were aiming to get to the city in time for Malaysian food, when we noticed a strange noise coming from Connie and a feeling of her lumping along. Sure enough, the back left tire was dead flat. Unfortunately for us, we had been irresponsible car owners and not patched our LAST flat tire from a few months ago, which wouldn't quite function as a spare in our new time of need. Totally guilty.
We called AA, for the second time in two days, but they said there was nothing they could do for us, seeing as we had adequate time (more than enough of it, actually) to patch the tire. So we called a private contractor, but they wanted to charge us 150 bucks. In a shining moment of brilliance, we realized we could take the flat from the spare compartment, hitch to the next town (Balclutha: 17 kms north), patch the tire, hitch back, and call AA again. Mel and I quickly gathered some things as Team Balclutha: cash, journals, books, a knife, a headlamp in case things got bad, rain jackets... and got picked up fairly quickly. We rolled the tire over and hoisted it and ourselves into the back of the truck. It turned out we had been picked up by the nicest family ever, and they dropped us off at the mechanic, got some groceries, came back and picked us up 20 minutes later, and helped us replace the tire. This was really fortunate for us, who would have been rolling our tire all around town trying to hitch a ride in a somewhat obscure direction. So Christy called and cancelled our AA assistance, also for the second time in two days.
The 15th was our day of errands. We got Connie all taken care of, and we got the bad news that the late Raspberry (the van we were trying to sell for a friend) had passed on. Engine seized, complete goner. We shopped around for different wreckers who might give us some money for the scraps, but it's been harder than we thought. We thought today might have been the end of our extreme streak of bad luck, but once again we were wrong. We drove out to the house in Waitati where we were house-sitting to pick up a few things we had left. On our way back into Dunedin, we picked up a couple 15 year old hitch hiking skater boys. Our rule is that they have to make us laugh to get a ride, tell us a joke or something. The poor boys looked too scared and frightened by us and our car packed to the roof that we let them in anyway, even though they couldn't come up with a single funny thing to tell us. They jammed themselves into the back seat, ducking under the surf board and sitting on top of a pile of books and bags, and we turned up the La Bouche tape we bought this afternoon. We mentioned that we wouldn't be surprised if we ran out of gas, but that would have to be a risk they were willing to take (half joking), but then we actually DID run out of gas. We pulled the car over, laughing hysterically and further terrifying the boys, and Christy and I jumped out to hitch into town: Team Dunedin. We got back to Connie in record time, and were glad to see that the boys had found another ride to town that was a little more reliable.
We sent Mel from Dunedin up to Wanaka as reinforcement for Lauren, who had been all by herself for far too long and was really craving a hug from Connie. Christy and I stayed behind to deal with Raspberry, and hitched to Wanaka the next day, about the equivalent of hitching from SLO to San Francisco. Ten rides later and a rescue phone call to the girls, they drove half an hour south and picked us up under a street lamp at 11pm, spooning on the gravel under a misty rain. We met some real characters on our way up.. a few sheep farmers, some travelers, various boys between the ages of 17 and 24, and even HELEN, our emergency contact from house-sitting in Waitati. This IS a small country.
To top it all off, I've been pretty sick for the last 9 days. I had the fever for quite a few of the days, and intestinal malfunction for all of them. It's hard being sick when you're living out of a car, but the girls are saints and have put up with me well. Especially Christy, who went around town to set up an appointment and took me to the doctor to get this all figured out.
So now we are at the Addington's in Christchurch, getting ready to take Lauren to the airport in a couple hours. It feels surreal that she is leaving this place, leaving our fam, leaving Connie. But I think there is a part of all of us that is a little jealous at the same time that she'll be home so soon and able to go to San Luis and see her family and sleep in her bed. In the end, four months will feel like nothing and then we'll all be home too. So we are hoping that our luck will shift back in the other direction now. I think our upcoming adventure to Australia will hold great things. We have already purchased outfits that we plan on wearing every day (Mel got some powder blue shorts that go up past her belly button. I got an 80s one piece swimswuit. Christy got a tropical floral garden print sports bra.) We are also traveling with George and Jack the first week we get there, so I don't see how anything could really go wrong. Famous last words, right?
Let's start with the 12th and make our way to the present. We were driving along toward the Milford Sound, had crested the mountain and been going downhill for quite a while, calmly gazing out the windows at the majestic beauty and listening to Yann Tiersen, when I pushed down on the brake and felt nothing. Pushed down again, approaching panic mode, and still nothing to slow our moving bulk of stationwagon down the narrow winding road. I instantly shot into an adrenaline pumped altered consciousness and somehow slowed the car down enough to get it to stop, threw on the hazard flashers, and came back to reality. The boys in the car behind us pulled over to make sure we were okay, and we made complete fools of ourselves when we opened the hood to take a look. "Oh yeah, the coolant is just a little brown and chunky. Don't worry about that. Brake fluid? Let's see...where's the brake fluid... uhh.. I think we'll be okay boys. You go on ahead." Erg. Christy and Mel got back in to move the car off to the side and almost went flying down the road, but luckily Christy's marvelous reflexes reached for the emergency brake. It was most definitely an emergency.
Mel and I hitched a ride to town as Team Milford and the girls stayed to slow down traffic as Team Connie. We got a ride with a foxy repair man who dropped us off at the pay phones. For the next hour, we tried to call AA and roadside assistance, but the general consensus was that we were in the middle of NOWHERE, and without a real miracle we were out of luck. Great, Connie. Nice place to pick. The roadside assistance guy said he'd call me back at the pay phone (no cell service in the middle of nowhere), so I sat on the ground in there and began this entry. Mel arrived back after trying to find help around town and was on the phone with the tow service as I looked out the window of the phone booth and saw Connie herself roll into town. It took a few seconds to register before I slapped my palm against the glass, informing Mel that CONNIE was outside. "Okay ma'am, nevermind, looks like my car just drove into town." We ran to the girls, ecstatic that our afternoon would not be spent on the side of the road waiting to be towed to the two hour away next nearest town, and they told us their series of events. I'll let Christy take over from here.
It was just like Megan said. We're all cruising along, I was in the backseat, probably absent mindedly thinking about something as significant as how large Mel's tongue is, and was snapped into reality by Megan with a fair amount of panic in her voice saying the brakes had gone out. Let the games begin.
We decided to split into Team Connie, comprised of Roxy and I, and Team Milford, which was Megan and Mel. They took off with the repair man, my teammate and I walked a little up the road where we would attempt to warn oncoming drivers that just around the corner was our little car, with her large rear end taking up half of the lane. Turns out it's really hard to communicate "Connie is stalled out ahead. Please slow down so you don't smash into our only car and home," to someone speeding past you by using just your hands. Our best attempts were something like this: Point your left hand in the Commodore's direction. Make sure to not use your thumb lest someone thinks you're attempting to hitchhike from the least conducive pick up spot in the southland. With your right hand, make the universal slow down motion, while simultaneously mouthing s-l-o-w d-o-w-n. There was also the second message for cars that started to stop to make sure we were alright: a vigorous shaking of the head while making the traditional umpire "safe" motion followed by a smile and a thumbs up. We hoped the message they would get from this would be "We've already sent two people ahead, and are probably doing the best we can in the situation, so thanks so much, but you don't need to stop and help us. Enjoy your time in Milford Sound." I would love to hear what all the various interpretations of our hand signals were. We were also being EATEN by sandflies, the nasty little midges that swarm you leaving bites that itch like the dickens and last for days.
As I was walking back to Connie to get another round of bug repellent, a road work truck pulled over to see what the fuss was all about. Roxy explained the situation to Ian (our hero, you'll see) who very quickly determined that the brakes had probably just overheated and needed to cool down but offered to check Connie out anyway. "Oh! A Holden Commodore! She'll be alright!" I'm telling you, Kiwis LOVE Connie. He gave her a test drive, declared her fit for the road, and after making us promise to always downshift instead of using the brakes while going downhill, sent us off down the hill again with him and his buddy following behind, just to be nice. We reached a place where we were stopped by a flagger for road construction and Ian got out to have a chat with the worker. Roxy and I couldn't hear what was happening, but the two of them kept pointing to us. We made sure to politely wave when they looked our direction. Ian came over and said he wanted to make sure we could meet up with the girls so we could cancel the tow truck coming for us. What a nice guy, right? Apparently he had set the man with the radio to the task of figuring out where Team Milford had gone. He returned maybe one minute later and cheerfully told us that Megan and Mel were outside the cafeteria and gave us directions to there. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand how it is that a road worker outside of Milford could get on the radio and find the location of two ordinary looking girls in one of the largest tourist destinations in the country, but he did. We gleefully (and slowly) drove down to the cafeteria. I will never in my life forget the look on Megan's face when she saw us from inside the phone booth. Roxy and I started screaming, she and Mel started screaming. Connie had done it. The Holden Commodore... yeah, she'll be alright for sure.
Alright, back to Megan.
People in this country are looking out for us. We are still unsure how and who knew we were there. After it all, we ended up spending the afternoon on a boat in the Sound, where we saw spectacular mountains rising straight from the sea and hundreds of waterfalls.
So. On to the next unfortunate event. Driving from Milford to the Catlins meant we got in pretty late, and as we were scoping out different sites to set up our tent, we embarrassingly got Connie stuck in the mud. Three of us had to get out and push her backwards down the slope, while a few amused campers listened to our shenanigans. At least they couldn't see us in the dark, unlike every car that drove past us on the side of the road on their way to Milford. Our tent poles also picked this time to break, but luckily Christy and Roxy were brilliant and strung them back together by hand. It started to rain as we were sleeping that night, getting louder over the course of a few hours until we realized we were all laying awake to a complete downpour on our not-so-waterproof tent. We woke up at 6, with our therm-a-rests/sleeping bags/clothing soaking wet. Roxy's pillow was the worst..we could ring the water out of it. We sat for at least 30 minutes in our tent puddle, half laughing and half drowning in self-pity, until we made ourselves go out into the storm and pack our drenched life into the back seat of Connie. We got a tiny little break in the rain and smiled about how everything works out, although I think that optimism might be a unique quality of our traveling team. By 6:30am, we were rolling out of the campsite. ...All right all right, so the truth is we were spinning our wheels in the mud with three girls pushing the back of the car, again. Christy got some supernatural burst of strength, similar to a mother lifting a car off her trapped child, and singlehandedly got Connie out of the mud, wearing just her underwear the entire time. I really hope someone else was watching from their tent window. It would be a shame for no one to have witnessed that, especially her legs covered in mud after it all. Hours later, we found a cafe that had opened and spewed our wet stuff all over the parking lot to dry.
Later that day (still January 14th) we left the cafe and, no joke, got a flat tire. It was NOT funny at the time, but is at least a little comical now. At that point we were on our way to Dunedin, where Roxy needed to be by 6:30 the next morning to make her flight. We were aiming to get to the city in time for Malaysian food, when we noticed a strange noise coming from Connie and a feeling of her lumping along. Sure enough, the back left tire was dead flat. Unfortunately for us, we had been irresponsible car owners and not patched our LAST flat tire from a few months ago, which wouldn't quite function as a spare in our new time of need. Totally guilty.
We called AA, for the second time in two days, but they said there was nothing they could do for us, seeing as we had adequate time (more than enough of it, actually) to patch the tire. So we called a private contractor, but they wanted to charge us 150 bucks. In a shining moment of brilliance, we realized we could take the flat from the spare compartment, hitch to the next town (Balclutha: 17 kms north), patch the tire, hitch back, and call AA again. Mel and I quickly gathered some things as Team Balclutha: cash, journals, books, a knife, a headlamp in case things got bad, rain jackets... and got picked up fairly quickly. We rolled the tire over and hoisted it and ourselves into the back of the truck. It turned out we had been picked up by the nicest family ever, and they dropped us off at the mechanic, got some groceries, came back and picked us up 20 minutes later, and helped us replace the tire. This was really fortunate for us, who would have been rolling our tire all around town trying to hitch a ride in a somewhat obscure direction. So Christy called and cancelled our AA assistance, also for the second time in two days.
The 15th was our day of errands. We got Connie all taken care of, and we got the bad news that the late Raspberry (the van we were trying to sell for a friend) had passed on. Engine seized, complete goner. We shopped around for different wreckers who might give us some money for the scraps, but it's been harder than we thought. We thought today might have been the end of our extreme streak of bad luck, but once again we were wrong. We drove out to the house in Waitati where we were house-sitting to pick up a few things we had left. On our way back into Dunedin, we picked up a couple 15 year old hitch hiking skater boys. Our rule is that they have to make us laugh to get a ride, tell us a joke or something. The poor boys looked too scared and frightened by us and our car packed to the roof that we let them in anyway, even though they couldn't come up with a single funny thing to tell us. They jammed themselves into the back seat, ducking under the surf board and sitting on top of a pile of books and bags, and we turned up the La Bouche tape we bought this afternoon. We mentioned that we wouldn't be surprised if we ran out of gas, but that would have to be a risk they were willing to take (half joking), but then we actually DID run out of gas. We pulled the car over, laughing hysterically and further terrifying the boys, and Christy and I jumped out to hitch into town: Team Dunedin. We got back to Connie in record time, and were glad to see that the boys had found another ride to town that was a little more reliable.
We sent Mel from Dunedin up to Wanaka as reinforcement for Lauren, who had been all by herself for far too long and was really craving a hug from Connie. Christy and I stayed behind to deal with Raspberry, and hitched to Wanaka the next day, about the equivalent of hitching from SLO to San Francisco. Ten rides later and a rescue phone call to the girls, they drove half an hour south and picked us up under a street lamp at 11pm, spooning on the gravel under a misty rain. We met some real characters on our way up.. a few sheep farmers, some travelers, various boys between the ages of 17 and 24, and even HELEN, our emergency contact from house-sitting in Waitati. This IS a small country.
To top it all off, I've been pretty sick for the last 9 days. I had the fever for quite a few of the days, and intestinal malfunction for all of them. It's hard being sick when you're living out of a car, but the girls are saints and have put up with me well. Especially Christy, who went around town to set up an appointment and took me to the doctor to get this all figured out.
So now we are at the Addington's in Christchurch, getting ready to take Lauren to the airport in a couple hours. It feels surreal that she is leaving this place, leaving our fam, leaving Connie. But I think there is a part of all of us that is a little jealous at the same time that she'll be home so soon and able to go to San Luis and see her family and sleep in her bed. In the end, four months will feel like nothing and then we'll all be home too. So we are hoping that our luck will shift back in the other direction now. I think our upcoming adventure to Australia will hold great things. We have already purchased outfits that we plan on wearing every day (Mel got some powder blue shorts that go up past her belly button. I got an 80s one piece swimswuit. Christy got a tropical floral garden print sports bra.) We are also traveling with George and Jack the first week we get there, so I don't see how anything could really go wrong. Famous last words, right?
Good thing you will be with Jack and George now-an engineer and a farm boy? They can fix anything. A flat tire and brake fade will be weak sauce for them...
ReplyDeleteScott
The only thing I missed in your story was what I imagine Roxy's response was "You MORONS". That had to have been there.
ReplyDeleteThe RIGHT part of what has happened is that you have some good stories about how the Kiwis have come through for you in your moments of need. Way to get up close and personal with the Kiwis, and to find out what they're made of.
With your new outfits, I hope the Aussies don't refuse you entry!
Momma Dunbar