Woke up to the hot sun on the tent all relived to have had zero crazy kiwi sitings for the night. While Shabree and I slept soundly our friends explained how the Solvakian couple kept them up for hours making no effort to keep quite how much they were enjoying each other in their tent, thankfully we had slept through it. We packed the car again in-between throwing the rugby ball around and prepared for another day of driving. We headed into Haas pass and the sites were again beautiful huge snow capped mountains and beautiful weather.
We were making great time down through the pass to the ocean where the marine layer set in, reminded us of the Oregon Coast, beautiful until just before you get to the beach. Cruising along we were about 15min out side of Hasst a very small town on the west coast when we heard a loud POP! Crap…flat tire! There was no shoulder but we got over as far as we could and put on the flashers and told everyone to get out quick, it was go time, pit crew style. We were amazed that there was no other damage just the crap tire. We put the donut on and thought about leaving some of us to walk back to town since it was so small and bald, but we piled in and went about 5mph's back to Hasst. We were so lucky that Haas a town of 250 has a mechanic shop and that we were only 15min away since the next town was over 2 hrs north. However, our luck stopped there, the mechanic did have a tire, but he charged us off hours because it was a Saturday so $210 later we had our new tire. The guy told us that all of our tires were the wrong size, a little smaller than recommended, and he looked at our other back tire and it was very worn on the inside but he did not have another replacement. He could not explain how this wearing was happening, had us get in the van and watched how it ran fully loaded, it looked fine and he thought the tires must have been damaged on another vehicle because ours seemed to be riding straight and true.
Feeling stressed about our other tire we drove towards Fox Glacier, being really easy on left hand turns that put a lot of pressure on the worn tire. About fifteen minutes out of town again we ran into a road block. It was a woman on a horse drinking a beer, she told us just to pull over, they were moving cattle up the road to a new pasture. This was a first for Paul and I, we have been stopped by sheep but never a herd of cows on a major highway. Once most of the cows were in pasture we were told we could drive on but just to watch for stragglers. We made it past the cows and after a couple hours pulled into Fox Glacier one of the few glaciers in the world that flow trough a subtropical rain forest. We got out of the van and walked to the glacier, it was cool, but we were all a little antsy to move on, so we rallied and drove another two hours to Hokitika. By the time we pulled in it was about 8pm and we were all so tired of driving! We found a small grocery store that was open and managed to scrape something up for dinner. We found a Kiwi motor camp, and were surprised it was rundown since all the others we have found were super nice. During dinner we chatted with two gals from Ontario, Canada. One of them had been going to school in Christchurch for a year and the other was a friend from home here to visit for a few weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment