When I woke up I felt much, much better. I had been able to sleep on my left side for most of the night, and toward the morning I even rolled onto my right side. We woke up but didn’t get out of bed; after a short while, I even crawled over into Amanda’s bed and she could touch me without causing massive amounts of pain. When I finally got up, I discovered that I could lift my arms most of the way over my head, and I even put on a t-shirt by myself and wore it without issue. It was green, in fact Green Lantern, for St. Patrick’s Day.
After we cleared out of our ginormous cabin, we headed north, with me back in the driver’s seat again. I asked Amanda where we were going and she said north. I asked her an hour later and she said north. We took a scenic route to where we were actually going so that Amanda could see a river, but she didn’t tell us when we passed the river, she just took some pictures out the car window and we kept going. Later, when she guided me back to highway 1, I said, "Highway 1? Why didn’t we just stay on 1 in the first place?" and she said because she wanted to see that river, and I said I didn’t see the river. I said, how many miles out of the way did we go so you could see the river that I didn’t even get to see? And Alyssa found this hilarious for some reason. It turned out to be about 50 kilometers out of our way, and we didn’t even stop. Amanda said, "Do you want to go back?" and Alyssa busted out laughing again, so hard we thought she’d hurt herself. It was a ways back so I said no. Alyssa continued to laugh. We attempted to kill her by referencing previous things that she’d laughed hard at on the trip, first the workers in Hell’s kitchen and then I said, "I think that, to kill her, we’re only about one Don Street, Go! away," and she stopped breathing for a time. I said, "Right, then."
We did a lot more driving, trying to get to a volcano with a hard name that I can’t think of. I’ll just refer to it as Mount Doom, since this volcano was used as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings movies. We almost arrived at the volcano at around 3pm, but we were dangerously low on gas and weren’t sure if we could make it the 7km off the main drag to the volcano, then the 7km back plus the 20 or so to the next town, so we just headed up to the town. The town had no gas station. They sent us to a village called National Park Village, where they had a gas station where I had the most interesting conversation with a clerk. We’d decided to have lunch in town, before scaling Mount Doom, so I went in to inquire about any restaurants in National Park Village. There were two clerks, a woman and a man, and both were busy. I wandered for a bit, waiting, and then the woman came to be available. I asked her if there were any restaurants in the village, and she pointed at the man and said, "you need to talk to this guy." He had just come to be available.
He was facing away at that moment, as I walked over to him he turned around and said, "Why a toaster?"
"That’s amazing," I said. "I’ve had it for about two months now and you’re the first person to say something." I went on to explain the toaster. We then discussed restaurants for a few minutes, then he asked where I was from. "Wisconsin," I said.
"Aaah! The Big Cheese!" I was shocked that he knew where Wisconsin was, very few people over here do. He went on to relate his stories of spending a summer with a friend in Wisconsin where they got really, really drunk and filled a boat with beer and just floated down a river for a whole weekend drinking. I thought that was a very Wisconsin thing to do. We also talked about Indianapolis for a bit. I didn’t think he could have been in New Zealand for very long, he doesn’t have the accent.
TANGENT: Sam and the others in Indianapolis always tell me that I have this Wisconsin accent, which I’ve finally begun to recognize. It’s something in the way we say the letter O, they say, and I can hear it now. That said, I think the New Zealand accent is largely in the letter E. There is no short E, only long. Like when they say "left" it comes out like "leeft." Like "leaf." Interesting. I digress.
On that guy’s advice, we went to a bar called the Schnapps Bar. Alyssa and I discussed what a great story it would be to tell people back home that we got really fucking drunk and climbed a mountain, so we ordered alcohol with our lunches. The two of us got huge salads that cost $22. Amanda got a bowl of soup for $9, which was also huge. The drink I ended up with was that same Jamaican rum, whose name I still cannot recall, in pineapple juice. I can’t really say what I thought of it, it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t good either. I probably won’t try it again.
But everything was expensive. For Amanda and I, lunch came to $40, which was much more than I’d intended to spend on lunch. Given that over half of that was my salad, I feel less bad about adding alcohol, I thought that would be more costly, I guess. Alyssa’s drink was $12. It was a Kamikaze Shaker.
We went back to the same gas station with the intent of buying a small bottle of vodka to mix with this lemon soda I’d purchased at a previous gas station that wasn’t very good by itself. I had said I thought it might taste better if we took it home and added rum or vodka, and Amanda – Amanda! – had said, why wait until we get home? Unfortunately the gas station did not sell liquor. The same clerk said to me, "go back to the building where you had lunch, it’s the window on the left side." We felt a little dumb…at least I did. We went back, but a liter of vodka cost $38 so we said forget this and drove out to Mount Doom.
It was past 5pm by the time we got there. We were going to start out anyway but it took so long to get everything prepared, and I don’t even know what the hell it was that took so long since I was pretty well ready to go as soon as we arrived, and by the time we started out for the mountain (listed on the signs in the parking lot as a 7-8 hour walk, round trip), we knew it would be dark before we reached the top, and what Amanda really wants to see here is the lake in the crater. So we walked out about twenty minutes from the car park, where it’s still largely flat, to take some pictures. For some reason Amanda’s camera stopped working. It worked just fine right as we started walking, we took some pictures in the car park, but suddenly the buttons wouldn’t work. It turned on, the viewscreen worked, if you flipped the switch to different modes it would work, but none of the buttons would do anything. At first I suspected magnetic interference from the mountain, but Alyssa’s camera worked fine. We walked back to Lucy. We are going to sleep in Lucy tonight and set out to conquer Mount Doom at approximately 6am tomorrow. Or so we say.
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