Allow me to digress for a moment and then I'll get back to 5a.m today...when I wake up in the middle of the night in the campervan I always have the same three thoughts: (1) how cold and/or rainy is it outside, (2) how far is it to the bathroom, and (3) ugh, this fucking escape hatch.
First, I will explain the "escape hatch." Our campervan is a minivan. It has a driver side door, a passenger side door and a sliding door to the back. We sleep in the back. Evan, as I've mentioned, is significantly taller than me and he needs to sleep in the side where the sliding door is located. So, when I wake up in the middle of the night I have to wiggle out of my sleeping bag, climb over evan's feet from the back of the van, over the space heater, between the 2 front seats, and into the passenger seat where I grab my shoes and my jacket(s) and exit the vehicle. (And when I come back I enter the same way, just in reverse). It's quite the acrobatic number, especially when mostly asleep.
More frustrating than all that is knowing that it's cold and possibly rainy outside as well but I have no choice but to brave it to get to the bathroom which, unfortunately, is usually cold as well.
The last 4 days in Te Anau, fjordland, were the rainiest we've had and also got progressiveky colder. So when I woke up at 5a.m today I thought "wow, this rain sounds weird." Well...it wasn't rain. It was snow. And then I thought "I am soooo glad we're leaving Te Anau and heading north today. No more snow and maybe even a little warmer."
HA! Nope! We drove for over 3 hours through flurries, snow, white-out snow and any other type of snow you can imagine. Luckily the snow wasn't sticking to the road. It stuck to the mountains and the grass and even to the sheep (yes, I spent all 3 hours worrying about how cold the newborn lambs must be).
Finally we arrived in Wanaka where it continued to flurry and drizzle for a while. We didn't like the RV park so we set ourselves up in a hostel for a couple nights with amazing views of Lake Wanaka and the mountains. Evan is going snowboarding tomorrow and I am 100% ecstatic to look at the lake while sitting by the fire at the hostel or down in town at a cafe while I plan our 4 weeks of beaches (and hopefully warmth) in Australia. I'm also happy that for 2 nights I will not have "escape hatch" out of the van in the middle of the night.
What else did we do today? Well, we drove around Wanaka after the skies cleared a bit and encountered someone's guard sheep. First it said "baaaa" which I took to mean "what are you looking at?" Then it stood up and said "BAAAAAA" which I took to mean "get out of here or you're gonna get it!" Evan thought maybe it wanted to play. Not likely.
We also walked around town, had some pizza for lunch and tried some local beer - a "brewski" (not joking) and also a lager (a NZ penny for anyone who can explain what "quaffable contingencies" means). We followed that up with a bottle of wine back at the hostel and the marble cake with vanilla frosting we had stored in the "kitchen" of our van while we played a couple rounds of gin. Evan won't play grass with me anymore now that I beat him and he won't play Egyptian Ratskill (sp?) because I'm probably not enough of a challenge for him (my reflexes aren't what they used to be).
Finally we went to Cinema Paradiso and saw the most random French movie ever called "Micmacs" while sitting on super old, probably trash-picked couches. Google the movie, or even rent it. I can't put it into words but it was entertaining. Evan won free ice cream for balancing a NZ coin on a lemon and I gave in and bought an ice cream during intermission mostly because it was the longest intermission ever. And, to end our night, our windshield wipers froze to the windshield while we were in the movie and we have no ice scraper.
Have I mentioned that winter is my least favorite season?
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