Day 16:  Oamaru to Fairlie

16 December 2010
159 km (99 miles)

Okay, so we’ve already been to Fairlie on our bikes, but it’s on the way to Mt. Cook and Twizel, offering hiking and mountain biking respectively, so we are heading back.

But first, we had to brave the camper’s kitchen.  These Holiday Park kitchens are pretty darn nice, and certainly make life easier for the campervan-less with amenities like refrigerators and stoves, but they require a certain steeliness, an ability to hold one’s line, if you are to be competitive in the arena of making meals.  You must also be lightening quick to grab that burner or that microwave or that chair or you will find yourself empty-handed and empty-bellied.  All of these factors together make Gina the competetive Queen of the Kitchen.  Nothing comes between Gina and her food.  And certainly not our sourpuss-neighbor-camper that we mentioned in yesterday’s blog entry.  This chick is camping a few vans down and never smiles.  Never.  Even if you give her your heartiest American grin and “Hello!” she just stares you down as though you just took a dump on her shoe.  Something is seriously wrong with her and great, here she is in the kitchen this morning.  Just look down at your yogurt and Muesli, Dena, and ignore her.  Karma does have it’s way of working wonders and I suppose the fact that when sourpuss-neighbor-camper got upset about a campervan being parked too close to her tent, her bad energy transferred itself to her boyfriend’s driving skills and WHAM, that was a tree he just backed their rental car into.  That’s gonna cost a few bucks.  Bummer.  And heh.

After breakfast we had a few visitors.

I wasn’t feeding them, only wringing out the chamois from drying our wet tent.  I’ve really no idea why they came running over, but something I was doing was very interesting to them.  Maybe they sensed my positive penguin vibe and thought they’d get a little loving too.

Finally, we broke camp and motored (back) up the coast to Timaru, stopping for lunch off the beaten path in Centennial Park.  We originally thought we’d pull the bikes out of the van and go for a little toodle in the park but really, that would expend too much effort after getting everything perfectly packed, so we opted to keep motoring.  We did stop, however, back in Pleasant Point, where we had camped out in a cosy cabin 10 long days ago, to get an ice cream from the store owner who had rented us the cabin.  He was out to lunch but we were scooped by his wife, an extremely pleasant woman who queried us about where we’d been the past 10 days.  Like several Kiwis we’ve spoken with since abandoning our touring bikes, she nodded her head affirmatively that yes, the roads are really too narrow to be shared and yes, Kiwis do like to drive fast and expect the road to be all theirs.  We think she nearly invited us to her home for Christmas after hearing that we didn’t know exactly where we’d be.  I’m sure it would have been a fun, festive affair (she had that way about her) and obviously laden with good desserts.

Instead, we settled tonight for a $4.59 cent of baked beans.  This was troublesome to Gina that we paid so much for such a small and insignificant can of food, but when you don’t cook as well as our friend Julia, you have to pony up for something a little less special.

In Fairlie, we knew exactly how to get to our favorite Holiday Park, the one we sit at right now with the free internet.  Instead of a cozy cabin this time we’re spending our time here in a slightly less expensive cozy campsite.  Those receipts, I tell you … they have a way of catching up.

We also went for a short mountain bike ride on some single track adjacent to our campsite.

Gina looks the whoops! and whoas! while I ride at a bit more even-tempered speed, although I mostly feel like Kermit when I ride.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQLiX_yqkfk

Really, this feeling applies to nearly all outdoor adventures with Gina.  But we do have fun.

Day 15:  Oamaru

15 December 2010
Dinking in Oamaru

It rained last night and I had a nightmare.  The kind of nightmare where you’re trying to warn someone about some danger but you suddenly have no voice.  Apparently I did have a voice, though, and was using it in real life.  Hopefully none of the other campers heard me.

We were to rise this morning with the plan to head for Twizel, but after Gina had had a think on things last night, she woke up with a new plan.  This new plan was for us to stay here in Oamaru for the day, dink around town on our mountain bikes, and go see the blue penguins this evening.  I guess maybe my mumbling and grumbling last night about not getting to see the penguins – the main reason most people come to Oamaru, for there are both blue and yellow-eyed penguins nesting just outside of town – had its intended impact, and yay, we are now staying to see them tonight.  Who can resist penguins?

We also had another map studying session and now have a new plan for our next few days.  I won’t even bother blogging about it now, given how quickly things seem to change for us on this trip.  But suffice it to say that Gina has proclaimed that she is now having fun, so it must be a good and solid plan.

Our afternoon was spent toodling through town and its outskirts on our bikes, making a few more purchases that will no doubt be analyzed and reanalyzed over the course of the next few days, and catching up on our paperwork.  It doesn’t seem to matter how far you roam from home, you cannot escape the clutches of paperwork.  There is blogging paperwork and trip finance paperwork and receipts?  Oh my, there are receipts upon receipts to be recorded right now.  This is what happens when you go from having your entire life neatly tucked into four panniers to spreading it all out in a flash van.  It’s like moving from a studio apartment into a four bedroom home; the rooms slowly start to fill up.  We justify it all to ourselves as how we are “salvaging” our trip and really, we’re not big spenders or acquirers of things, but we’ve definitely stepped up the debiting a notch or two in the past few days.  Guaranteed that will come to a screetching halt after all those receipts get tallied.

All that sweating over receipts meant time for the showerhouse.  This is normally not something I would mention in a blog but today’s shower was special, in that in my rush to clean up before the sourpuss-neighbor-camper beat me to the showerhouse resulted in my forgetting my shower shoes.  No matter how clean that public shower may look, it’s not something I want to hang out in bare-footed.  So I showered in my socks.  This was quite tricky when it came to cleaning my feet.  How to wash my foot and my sock and get it all back together without touching the bare floor?  The answer lay in the handicap bar.  Good thing I beat that sourpuss to the quick.

A few hours before dusk we rode the bikes over to the penguin viewing area.  Tonight’s viewing: blue penguins.  We sat in a grandstand and watched the little guys come home from the sea.  They can make quite the racket as they approach shore, calling home to their chicks and spouses left behind for the day.  Then they waddle up the rocky shoreline, stopping to cool themselves down (apparently they’ve been out swimming 50 to 60 km during the day and need to rest a bit, like after one runs a marathon), shake their little tails (a re-oiling mechanism), and generally just look cute and cuddly before running (if you could call it that) across the top of the bank to their nesting area to the giggles of the crowd.  We have no pictures – photos were not allowed.  But we won’t soon forget them in our minds eye.  Mostly because on our bike ride back along the waterfront toward town after dark, we nearly ran over a few.  Well, not really, but we were quite close as those penguins that didn’t want to make a showtime entrance were coming ashore outside the fee area.  Good for them – way to be different!

Day 14:  Christchurch to Oamaru

14 December 2010
261 km (162 miles)

It was time for us to leave Stephen and Carol’s.  Again.  We cannot say enough about their generosity and patience.  We’ve stayed nearly as many days at their house as we did out on the road on the bikes.  Guess you just never know how things will go when traveling.

Lucy has packed up quite well.  Bikes stowed in the back, Kmart gear in the middle, and us up front.  As we motored through town on our way out, we were the envy of an entire busload of Kiwi kids.  They couldn’t take their eyes off our flash van.  A chatty, cheeky bunch, they bid us farewell with a “See ya later, TOURISTS.”  Okay, so maybe we don’t blend in so well in Lucy.  But she’s the workhorse we need to get around this stunning country and if we have to endure a little cheekiness along the way, so be it.  Better that than flat, I say.

The drive from Christchurch to Oamaru was, for the most part, dull and dangerous.  The Kiwis must think we are big weenies or whiners, but we find these high-speed, one-lane-in-each-direction-with-no-center-barrier roads to be quite challenging, whether on a bike or in a van.  It feels as though everyone is driving too fast.  And when that big sheep truck is riding Lucy’s ass, he’s clearly thinking we are driving too slow.  Probably better that the road was as straight and unscenic as it was – more eyes on the white line.

South of Timaru, the scenery started to spruce up with the proximity of the ocean, its aquamarine nearshore waters a nice distraction for the eyes.  As we passed the turn-offs for Geraldine and Fairlie, we made the first tactical error of our road trip (great, it’s only day one) and kept driving, thinking that we needn’t go back through there as we’d already done so on the bikes and the bus.  Approaching Oamaru, there was much frustration boiling over from the passenger seat, where a certain someone had realized that we really should have stayed north if we wanted to go mountain biking on trails near Twizel and Fairlie.  This was all determined in the course of 30 minutes of reading a mountain biking guide that had only been purchased a few hours earlier, but the woulda-coulda-shoulda’s had begun and when those get rolling, they are often unstoppable.

Regardless, we arrived in Oamaru and pitched our tent at the Top 10 Holiday Park.  We like the Top 10 Holiday Parks as they sometimes have free internet (but sadly not at this one) and are always pretty darn clean.  Over dinner we discussed our many options but we’re still not quite satisfied with our route.  We’ll have a think on it and reconvene in the morning.

Day 13:  Christchurch

13 December 2010
Logistics and Acquisition Day

Today was spent running.  Running around Christchurch.  From 7 am until 8 pm.  Oh how we miss the bikes.  But oh how good we feel about our decision to get off the busy roads.

The day started with picking up our van.  This van was originally a Toyota Corolla.  But there would be no way to fit our camping gear and clothing into a Corolla along with two mountain bikes.  Mountain bikes we did not yet own but ones we thought we should buy so we could continue cycling here in places perhaps a bit more hospitable to cyclists, i.e., the backroad dirt roads.  Sure, we could get twisted up by a log or boulder or river crossing, but it would be more of our own doing and maybe slightly more under our own control as opposed to being repeatedly passed by much larger objects traveling at high rates of speed.

This van we were picking up could of course not be a simple, non-descript, 21st century van.  That would have been too easy and truthfully, too expensive.  No, this van had to be more special than that.  It had to be a 1990’s flash lime green Toyota Lucida.  We don’t think it screams TOURIST, do you?

We have named her Lucy, partly due to her given name and partly in honour of Lucy the lovable German Shepherd (belonging to friends Lisa and Steve) who recently passed.  She was one of kind, just like our van, and we will romp through the countryside grinning from ear to ear, just as Lucy did in days gone by.

Now that we had wheels, there was shopping to do.  Car camping requires a bit more gear than bike touring – comforts like camping chairs and pillows – and we were not to be denied these pleasures.  In addition to that there was the little issue of mountain bikes.  We’d done the math and it would be more cost effective to buy bikes and sell them before leaving than to rent for a couple of months.  But how do two people like ourselves who (a) like to research ad nauseum before buying (Dena) and (b) wonder if every purchase was really necessary and now should be returned (Gina) buy mountain bikes on the fly?  Well, apparently the pressure of not enough time and really really really wanting to bike is all you need to succeed.

With the van being named Lucy and Christmas just around the corner, we decided to make it a Charlie Brown holiday.  Meet mountain bikes Linus and Charlie:

Next thing you know, one of them will have a spindly tree lashed to its rack.  OR (Molly, are you reading this?) lashed to the handlebars.  It’s so difficult to decide where a Christmas tree should go.