Tiffany and Greg Around the World
French Ridge hut
Mt. Aspiring National Park, NZ
Notices posted on the kitchen wall of French Ridge hut:
Seriously, we freaking love these people.
By now we’ve mentioned it enough that you’re probably asking “Hey guys? What are these huts and wardens and whatnot you keep talking about?”
Continue reading “A Hut Warden’s Life”
Mt. Aspiring National Park, NZ
Another aspect of friendship is the joint lexicon a group develops over time. Shared experiences become stories, stories become jokes, jokes become catchphrases and so on until it gets to the point where simply mentioning the last name of a high school teacher will bring smirks, smiles or groans of anguish from the right circle of people while making absolutely no sense to anyone else.
The longer one stays with a given group, the more detailed this secret language becomes. By extrapolation, one can easily concede that in 11+ years of exclusive relationship (8+ of actual marriage) quite an expansive vocabulary would develop. We bring this up, dear friends, to issue you fair warning:
If either of us ever describe an activity you are about to join us on as “Kiwi moderate” run away quickly.
We have no other way to describe it. “gods” seems too presumptuous for monotheists and “demi-gods” too second-rate. “Champions” too sporty and “giants” too dependent on physical proportions.
Google software engineers, F-16 fighter pilots, world-class preachers, property barons, lawyers and teachers, real-life Coast Guardsmen rescue personnel that make Kevin Costner look like a pansy (and the guy who actually did the stunts for him in the movie), freewheeling gypsies, ivy league college grads & PhDs, internet millionaires, global circumnavigating sailors, national level speakers and coaches, songwriters, sales directors who spend their free time climbing the ice encrusted peaks of Colorado, proud parents of beautiful, intelligent children the list goes on…
These are not people who we hope to someday become, or observe in awe from a distance and pray might deem us good enough to network with. These are the people with whom we drink beer and play Dungeons and Dragons. (Well, some of them. The rest are more into video games. We mix it up.)
Of course, they aren’t all those things to us. Usually they have first names and are, in general, rather humble about it all. Nonetheless when we stop to think about it the people around us are quite the collection. If we are indeed the product of those that surround us then we are grateful for the excellence of those we call friends. (That would be you all, in case you were checking.)
So as you might guess when we get an invite from one of these exceptional people for an amazing adventure, we do our best to make good…
Enroute Mt. Aspiring, NZ
We would be remiss to recount our many adventures in New Zealand and never once mention the Maori.
The “native” people of New Zealand are themselves settlers from a foreign land. Polynesian in origin, the Maori trace their roots back to the people of the South Pacific who used their…
“mind-bending supernatural powers of badass navigation so awesome it took the West hundreds of years and a satellite network to replicate what Polynesians could do in their heads around the time the rest of us were learning that fire was hot”
…to locate, land on and settle these islands a few hundred years before Europe came on the scene.
Massive authentic Maori war canoe : 75 feet long & able to carry 100 warriors to battle.
Eventually the West did show up and to make a long story short we colonized New Zealand and eventually claimed her for England. The nation retains its card-carrying status as a member of the “Empire on which the sun never sets” to this day as a member of the Commonwealth.
So where did this leave the natives?
Continue reading “Regarding the Locals”
Helensville, NZ
Despite rumors to the contrary, there’s a lot more out in the farms of New Zealand than Kiwis, possums and sheep:
Sometimes things fall into place and life moves on when we’re least expecting it. After about a month our battles with taxation came to an abrupt and, if annoying, at least vindicating conclusion, we got a job offer in Australia and received an invite for one last Kiwi adventure from an unexpected source.
The sailing life leads to odd relationships. Not odd in the quality but more in the means employed in establishing and growing those interpersonal connections: the happenstance, randomness and good fortune involved in who we even have the opportunity to connect with.
Some fellow sailors are friends for a meal or a few days in one port, remembered fondly but as fate and diverging cruising plans would have it, never to be rendezvoused with again.
Other people are friends for a longer time. Perhaps an overlapping prolonged stay in a Mexican port or a shared long-term rally provide ample opportunity to get to know each other over a longer period of time. The cruiser’s net, dinners aboard and joint shore excursions are the fabric with which we begin to weave our social tapestry. Radio comms and emails (yeah, you can get those via satellite uplink or over a HAM radio now…) allow us to fill in the gaps when we are mutually underway while Facebook and blogs can keep us connected while we’re in different ports.
In our case, there are those people who ask us onboard their vessels for anywhere from a few days to a few months. For that time we become roommates in a home that none of us can leave. Typically we share meals, time, adventures and our lives for however long we’re onboard. We, to a varying degree, become family. These people are, for the time we’re connected to them, a huge part of our world. Often we leave as good friends.
The downside to our situation is that, unlike most cruisers, we are unable to extend our time in places to form a relationship if our captain decides that they wish to depart. Friendships are created and maintained by a mixture of fortunate run-ins and dedicated effort placed into correspondence.
What we’re saying here is that interpersonal proximity is a variable, sometimes an obstacle and always a consideration in the formation and maintenance of friendships at sea.
Then there’s the case of Rod & Elisabeth.
Estimates vary widely but everyone seems to think there are AT LEAST seven invaders for every man, woman and child of this nation. Yes, that would be a force 30 million strong and growing by the day.
Not happy to simply live here in a land known for its beauty and kind hearted peoples, these soulless devils are pillaging the land and actually killing the natives in their own homes. Likely, at this very moment a mother is watching powerlessly as her innocent offspring is ruthlessly murdered by this merciless horde.
We are speaking, of course, of possums. Evil, dirty, disease-ridden, kiwi-killing possums.
Continue reading “Kiwi Killers”
We have found in life there are people who have learned to be good at something and possess “skill” (feel free to add the “z” as necessary) and people who have innate ability, which we’ll call “talent.” While talent does provide an edge to those with the good fortune to posses it, skill ultimately trumps it in the long run, which is why even the natural talents still need to practice. Sometimes though, an undeveloped latent talent doesn’t fade, or is discovered later in life and it provides us with potential insight into ourselves and our choices. “What if,” this talent, imbedded in our very beings, asks, “what if instead of taking the road you took, you had developed me instead?”
We bring this up because Greg is convinced he married a repressed sheep-whisperer…
