On-the-Road Tales

We cruised down along the westcoasrt and stopped at Cape Foulwind. Took a dander along the sea and came to a seal colony. Adorable little creatures, very playful. The seascape was fabulous. Continued on to Punakaiki Pancake Rocks and Blowholes. Hiked around to check out some stacked rocks formed funkily with the wind erosion. Stopped in Greymouth for ‘supplies’. Apparently we were going to have fancy dress that evening and the theme was ‘p’. A ‘p’ party. So we had to figure out a costume to be something beginning with P. Dress up? Everyknows I love that but with only a garbage bag given and no more room in my pack for playthings, was not sure what to do. Fortunetly, I had a brainstorm and stopped by the stationary store to sort my costume out.

We pulled in to Lake Mahinapua and I immediately realized the fancy dress was an effort to have us forget about the trailer park we were staying in! The ‘hotel’ was it – no town just a hotel run by an 80 yr old man. The Poo pub, as it was affectionately called was decorated with 10 years worth of photos of Kiwi busloads dressing up. 10 yrs times 1 bus per day of 50 people. That is a lot of polaroids. I took a walk down to the beach. Wow. It could have been 1000 yrs ago, it was so untouched. Thousands of rounded multicoloured stones littered the sand and driftwood – the size of forest trees – lay strewn up and down the beach. I wish I would have gotten there earlier to walk the length of the shoreline.

After dinner we got dollied up. My room had 2 Pirates, Prozac and me, ‘a postcard’. I pinned a bunch of, yes you guessed it, postcards to the garbage bag I wore and addressed the back. Fun night. My roomates and I walked down into the forest to see some more glowworms, on, land this time. We left just as the youngsters were headed towards the lake to skinny dip. Some of them, in their drunken stupor home did not quite find the dirt road and apparently got stung by not one, but two, electric fences. Serves them right!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.