Roadtrip Part Two

I’m fine. Sorry if I worried anyone with that last part; Slender Man was indeed there across the street, so I hurriedly typed that out in case… what? I went missing? Seems a little weird in hindsight, actually. In any case, I wrote it, slammed the laptop shut, locked the car, and the staring contest commenced. Needless to say, I lost. Several times.

It must have gone on for two, three hours. I was wondering if curtains for car windows had been invented when a truck passed by and he was gone without fanfare. I definitely wasn’t going to sleep after that, so I took the doctor’s journal out of the glovebox, leaned the seat back and started perusing it. It wasn’t the best material to read at night, but my other books were in the boot and I had absolutely no inclination to go out and get them. My laptop’s battery was also suddenly flat, which is why I hadn’t posted or commented until now. It’s currently charging from the hotel mains.

I must have fallen asleep at some point, since I woke up with the book on my face. And in a different location. This had less to do with teleportation and more to do with the fact I’d been towed.

I spent a decent part of the morning being friendly and apologetic, since I long ago learned that people don’t so much care about your actions as how you act about them, and I wanted to be on my way as fast as possible. I presented and filled out paperwork and paid the fine. I was told that they’d tried various ways to wake us up with no result, including banging heavily on the windows, so in the end they just moved the car with us in it.

I will say this about Queenstown; costly it may be, but I have never found a better Japanese restaurant than the one in the main mall. I’d forgotten what tendon tasted like. Black had teriyaki sushi, since I was starting to get used to the operandi of just buying him whatever he was looking at, or if he wasn’t looking at anything on the menu, whatever I was having. I also bought a pack of energy drinks, since I could tell I’d be needing them.

And off we went, before my wallet could be sucked out the car window.

The mountains are beautiful in the sunlight, if you ignore that everywhere is covered in bush. I stopped off in Gore for no reason other than to look at the giant trout sculpture, which I think bemused Black, and we were in Manapouri within two hours.

I drove down the main street and was hit by a wave of nostalgia. There’s a lot of memories embedded in this place, good and bad, and they all came back at once. Everything was smaller than I remembered but it was all still there; that loose plank in the school fence, there was the playground with the roundabout that never worked, there was that tree…

For a second I wondered if coming back here had been such a good idea.

I stopped at the hotel, sorted things out with reception and dropped off our stuff in our room. It was still afternoon and there was time to kill so I took Black on a tour of old haunts I don’t think he was very interested in, ending with having fish and chips on the lakefront. Then it was back to the hotel to unpack. If Adam is hitchhiking as well as walking I predict he’ll be here in a day or so. It’s kinda nice to be ahead of someone for a change.