Sleeping Under Different Stars: Nelson and Pohara

So I am cranking through blog posts here to catch up on the trip.  Jack and the kids are at the beach while I am at our motel waiting for the laundry to finish.  I am torn between being outside and reading a book, but inside is cool and I can hear the birds.  Lots of birds.  I thought I saw a very large bird fly outside the living room window here around dusk, but it was gone before I could get a good look.  I was also a little scared to see a massive bird.

I'll have to post pictures later.  The wifi here is a little slow, and I don't want to clog it up for the other guests.  The town of Pohara is very small and out of the way.  We had to drive up and then back down a winding mountain road to get here, which is bad enough except Jack had to drive on the left side of the road.  The roads here don't have much shoulder (in some cases, almost none), and he would err on the side of not crossing the center line.  I feared the car rolling into the ditch, or worst, down a mountain.  But we survived.  He just drove slowly, which is fine by me.  His first experience was in a town called Nelson, which reminds me of a much larger version of Roslyn, Washington.  It has lots of shops -- no big boxes insight.  The streets were crowded with people getting lunch, shopping and stopping in bakeries.  Even though everyone speaks English and the food is recognizable, I felt very foreign.  Big cities are fine -- they expect tourists.  In a small town, I felt like we stuck out.  Plus, we didn't know who to drive or where to go.  Sure, Jack knows the rules of the road, but that is different than the local practices of who should go first when you come to a four way stop.  What about pedestrians?  In Seattle, the law is they have the right of way.  Here, it looks like people walk quickly and cars won't hit you.  But I will prefer to wait when I am ped.

One thing I was worried about was lack of solitude on this trip.  One day into it, I started to panic:  I will have zero alone time for the next two weeks.  But here I am, doing laundry.  Doing laundry is a break from the amazing beauty that surrounds me.  New Zealand is far better than I thought it would be, and I had pretty high expectations.  In the past few months, we've watched the Lord of the Rings movies.  Even when I couldn't follow the plot, I would just watch it for the scenery.  But New Zealand is far more diverse than what is in the movies.  The Hobbits stayed on the farm, they didn't head out to the beaches.

Two more things.  Jack noticed that the sun stays in the northern sky.  In the northern hemisphere, a room with a southern exposure gets more sunlight.  Here, it is the opposite.  And last night, I stayed up late enough to see the night sky poking through the curtains.  Here I was, sleeping under different stars.