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.
