Road Trip

Here I am, in the big smoke! Although where I am living is really pretty cruisy. Not much smoke at all really, big or otherwise. I'm five minutes walk from the beach, surrounded by huge Pohutakawa trees and Tuis. I even have some friendly Moreporks who serenade us each evening. The house is like a treehouse from the inside as we are on the second level, in the treetops. I love it!

Anyhow, this is a quick blog about the trip up.

I love road trips and this one was pretty good. I departed Christchurch at 6.30am on the first day and pulled into Picton at 11.30am. I made one stop on the way, at Kaikoura to have a second breakfast (the one I had at 5am wasn’t lasting the distance) where I pulled out my laptop to answer some emails.

Next thing, I had a staff member from the café asking me if I was working on a piece for the Lonely Planet. Apparently I look just like someone who works for the Lonely Planet. 

Ha! That means I’m cool, or at least looked cool enough for the half hour I was eating pancakes in the café to fool people. That’s a novelty, because I’ve NEVER been cool, and I'm still not, but working for the Lonely Planet sounds like something cool hip people would do, so I’ll take it.

Anyway as I was driving I had plenty of time to ruminate as I had forgotten to pack any CDs for the journey. At one point, I rummaged around in the glove box and unearthed a Linkin Park CD and an old Dido CD that I’d forgotten about. I know, not the most obvious of musical combinations, but I have eclectic (read bi-polar) taste in music. I’m totally over Dido so that left me with one CD, and although I like Linkin Park, I cannot listen to them for four and a half hours without feeling very aggressive. Not good when one is on the open road and wants to live.

So some of my random ruminations as I tootled benignly along in silence were:

We live in a BEYOOTIFUL country. We really do. Although our cities are in the main, pretty darned ugly (don’t even get me started on the concrete shite piles that pass for architecture here, or the way we randomly tear down the beautiful old buildings we do have, to put up more concrete shite piles) our scenery is world class. It is easy to sit in the city and grizzle about all the things wrong with this country, but I will admit, as I cruised though our countryside, I felt pretty lucky and proud to be a New Zealander.

Also, our roads are really good! The vast majority of our drivers are too, despite all the talk about the road toll. Our roads are in good condition, well signposted – a child could find their way from Christchurch to Picton without a map – and did I mention the scenery was awesome? I was ruminating about the engineering involved in getting the curves and angle in the road just right to maximize smoothness in turning and it occurred to me there is a LOT of work in a road. I don’t mind paying lots of taxes to have such nice roads.

Which led me to the next rumination: taxes and levies. I know people by and large hate paying them, but I really don’t mind. I quite like living in a country where we have decent roads with police to curb the maniac drivers, ACC, and clean running water, (all of which we take for granted).

Anyway, back to the road trip. I loved traveling on the ferry from Picton to Wellies. It gave me the spark of excitement I used to get from getting on a plane, and it was a relaxing way to spend three hours in preparation for the journey from Wellies to Aucks the following day.

Prior to taking this trip I had been warned that it was a bit of a mission to drive from Wellington to Auckland. Not Much Fun at All seemed to be the general consensus, along with It's An Awfully Long Way to Drive in One Day. So I didn't have terribly high expectations of actually enjoying that trip.

Although it would have to be pretty bad to match the Worst Road Journey I Ever Took which was when I was backpacking through Australia's east coast. I spent approximately 24 hours in an Australian bus, sitting bolt upright while squashed by my seatmate, a scary and smelly woman of generous proportions who seemed to feel entitled to half my seat as well as her own, while staring out at the endless Australian desert. Words cannot describe the boredom and discomfort of that journey.

After the memory of that, I found the journey from Wellies to Aucks if not exactly a breeze (the folks were right, it IS an awfully long way), was certainly not nearly as bad as some people made out. I quite enjoyed it actually. I liked stopping at various Tiny Towns in the Backwoods of Nowhere. I liked cruising along and taking in the scenery. 

Although some of my enjoyment may have been to do with the fact that my lovely daughter was taking a plane up to Auckland with her dad so I was driving alone. I didn't have to listen to "MuuuuuuuM!", or "I'm bored!" or "When are we going to get there?" or "I'm hungry/thirsty/too hot/too cold/need the toilet!"

I love her dearly but suspect if she had been with me, the trip might have given my Australian bus trip some stiff competition for its Worst Road Journey I Ever Took crown.

But on my own, it was great. Nothing to do but to get from point A to point B and preferably avoid being part of the holiday road toll. A breeze for a multi-tasking parent. I'd even venture to say that at some points it was downright relaxing.