All Blacks/Wallabies

Today I went just about as far north as a human being can go on the South Island without a wetsuit and a pretty decent pair of flippers.

After a long and harrowing ride up Route 60 from Motueka, I passed through Takaka and Collingwood to finally make it out to Farewell Spit.  The tide was out, so by the time I parked the Spaceship and found my way out to the beach, the actual coastline was probably about half a mile out  Undeterred, I thought how cool it would be to actually walk all the way out to the water.  After all, the sun was shining, the beach was soft and inviting, and it seemed like a good idea.

After a solid half an hour of picking my way around little lagoons and eddies and fending off the advances of the surprisingly aggressive seagulls, I finally found myself at the true water's edge.  What does the shoreline look like at low tide and half a mile out, you ask?  Well, surprisingly like every other shoreline I've ever been on.  It was really cool and exciting to be so far out and so far away from everything else on land, but sopping wet shoes was kind of a big price to pay for it.  They're drying now back in the hostel.

On the way back to the shoreline, what appears to have been a twenty-minute hurricane blew through the area, soaking me from head to toe.  I was still a good quarter-mile from the shore, so there wasn't much I could really do about it except laugh and call myself an idiot for walking all the way out there.  Serves me right.

Anyway, everything else is cool around here.  Motueka is essentially shutting itself down right about now (it's around 5:15 pm) in preparation for the All Blacks/Wallabies rugby game.  That's New Zealand vs. Australia to us.  Everything is closing.  It's kind of weird.  There are like three bars in this town, and one of them is closing and telling customers to go to The Dodgy Ref, the one with the bigscreen TV.  There's a sign on a Thai place that says, "Closed for the game.  Eat somewhere else."  It's kind of funny just to watch, and even though I'm not caught up in all the excitement like everyone around me, it's gearing up to be a fun evening.

That'll do it.  More from wherever I end up tomorrow.

P.S.  "Double-fleece Mishka," that was some sketchy texting.  You're a goob.