I though it was the most comfortable night’s sleep I’d had since the motel, despite the fact that I was in the driver’s seat with my feet around the pedals all night. Alyssa disagreed heartily. She was riding shotgun. Amanda got the back seat to herself, which she said was ok except that she couldn’t stretch her legs out which sucked. I guess I made out the best then.
When we woke up, I stated a desire to leave expediently, as I was unsure whether we’d parked in the right place and I didn’t want anybody coming up to us and saying, "what are you doing there?," so we pretty much just drove back to Invercargill. We stopped at that same gas station to fill up and use the bathroom, and get breakfast since Alyssa had smashed our muffins in her sleep. We ate the smashed muffins anyway. From there we argued over who got to sit in the back seat and, when Amanda finally defeated me, we were on our way.
We were heading for Te Anau, but somehow ended up in Otautau when our highway inexplicably ended. We simply came to a fork where neither direction said Te Anau anymore, and were dumbfounded until I pointed out the sign behind us stating that Te Anau was 111 kilometers back the way we’d just came. As it turned out, we’d missed a turn about thirty kilometers back, so it was about 60 kilometers of ground that we didn’t need to cover. Less than an hour of lost time, really, and just some more New Zealand that we got to view, so not such a bad mistake.
We decided that, since we were so uncomfortable the previous night and since we saved a bunch of money by sleeping free, we’d splurge a bit and get some real beds to sleep in. We checked in to the Fiordland Motor Lodge, which has another name that I can’t think of, and got a room with three beds for $85. They didn’t have anything else left for less than $120. It had a big bed and two small ones, so we threw all the gear on the one in the middle and Amanda & I took the big one. I took a massive shit since I hadn’t pooped at all since Christchurch. After Alyssa got done looking through some pictures of her dogs and Amanda & I got done beating the hell out of each other and, inadvertently, rearranging the furniture, we went for a walk around town. We were trying to find our way to a restaurant aptly named Pizza & Pasta. As we walked down the main drag, we stopped for a moment to consult our map and make sure we were actually heading in the correct direction for this Pizza & Pasta place, which we were, but as we stood there looking over the map a helicopter randomly flew directly over our heads by about ten feet and landed the same distance away from us. And I kept yelling, "where’s my camera now?! Where’s my camera now?!" because it was back at the hotel charging, since we didn’t get a chance to charge it the previous night (see: slept in the frigging van).
When we finally found Pizza & Pasta we discovered that it didn’t actually open until 5:30pm. Strange? Kind of. It was a different restaurant until then, some kind of a bakery. We each got milkshakes from the bakery (Alyssa, chocolate; Amanda, banana; Trevor, Strawberry) and wandered around through all the tourist shops. We got some little gifties for people back home, but not much…I’m trying to save all of that for Auckland so that we don’t have to haul it all over the country for the next two weeks. We saw the same lady minding two different shops, I got a slight déjà vu. We headed back and ended up right in front of Pizza & Pasta. I had the most awesome lemon chicken & bacon spaghetti. Alyssa had some kind of spaghetti that she picked most of the contents out of. Amanda had a lasagna. It was good. We drank more L&P in some cool glass bottles that I kept.
We returned to the motel, where I took another massive shit and it rained a lot. I finally emptied all of the video and photos out of my camera (there was still stuff from GenCon in there). I finished typing this.
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