I11 Oct 2014 - Saturday. Just finished journaling our trip so far in my Evernote offline notebook. Today, we will go into town and check out the internet cafe. I've searched the phone book for yarn stores and fabric stores, and I hope we find the Wanaka yarn stores today. I also want to check out the churches for tomorrow.
Update on today later...
...
So now it is a day later, and I will try to catch up. It's easy to forget. Experiences seem to run together when we delay.
Saturday morning, we leisurely had breakfast and lounged around for a while. Lauren was tired from the 6 hours +/- driving to get here, and because I know he wants to please me, I want to be careful what I ask for. My excitement endurance is greater than his at this point because Lauren's has already been exhausted. I know I can push to an overwhelming degree.
Our quest for the day was to go to the internet cafe and get online. We are both internet junkies. Years ago, when we traveled to Germany, I had rigged some contraptions that I had read about so we could use German phones as modems. This was long before broadband, and wireless was totally a thing of the distant future. I can't remember how I did it, but in one place, I remember it involved some gadgets I had purchased on the internet and some tape to hold them all together so the chain of gadgets wouldn't come uncoupled. We practically had to dismantle the German phone to achieve the goal, and we had to re-mantle it so our landlord wouldn't know what we had done. I still have the gadgets, but today I wouldn't have the first clue about how to rig the phone for our purposes. I recall something about "pulses" that our gadgets would send to make the phone lines accept data from our computer (think 12-15 pounds of laptop back then), but that's about it.
Fastforward to the present, I was sitting at the table in our condo this morning when Lauren brought this little business card to me and asked me if I thought it meant anything. Well, it did. The property management agent had given it to Lauren when he checked in, and it instructed us to find a WiFi broadcast in the list of WiFis available on our devices, then select a certain one, enter a code and a pin. According to the list we found, the signal is broadcasted from a router somewhere here by our condo association. Wow! I linked to it, and it worked. Nothing about this in our condo manual. We didn't need the internet cafe. Our free connection permitted 2 devices for a total of 250 mg or 7 days, whichever came first.
So we went to town to take care of my second quest for the day - find some New Zealand wool (yarn) for Donna. I had found listings for three shops in the phone book (we have a phone book here, and found a phone in a drawer, but no service when we plugged it in). We found the first yarn shop right away, and their selection was wonderful. I purchased three skeins of New Zealand Possum wool - each a different color). Beautiful stuff, and definitely a New Zealand product! I won't need to look further. (Possums are a problem in New Zealand, and the answer to the problem is hoped to be to make a commercial success out of their skins and fur so that people kill them and make them work good for the country instead of bad. Google it.)
I was still curious about the internet cafe. We went there, and Lauren went in to ask about their rates. The clerk gave him their range of prices and also told him we could connect to a free Wanaka service from about anywhere downtown. I connected my cell phone, and uploaded all my Facebook postings from my phone, uploaded my phone photos to a Google cloud service on Google+, and updated my email on my phone's email client. Terrific find!! (We have Verizon Global and are paying for data connection, and I had already used more than 50mg for uploading my photos to Google+. I was afraid this was getting too expensive!)
We found a nice sandwich shop, had some hokey-pokey ice cream (apparently a New Zealand favorite), and then we sat in the car by the lake for a while. I could tell Lauren was waning. He just wanted to rest. Newness is exhausting when there is no calm to let it sink in.
(I remember my first trip to Europe, back in the days when everyone didn't speak English as they do today, and I remember how wonderful it was to go back to our lodgings and close the door, shutting out all that unintelligible language surrounding me. It was a lesson in over saturation of "newness." Here the newness is driving on the wrong side of the road, in an unfamiliar car, sitting on the wrong side of the car to drive, having the turn signals on the opposite side of what you expect, reading unfamiliar road signs, driving in an unfamiliar country, navigating an unfamiliar town, etc. And Lauren is suffering the brunt of it. He is the sole driver, by choice and mutual agreement. Exhausting! )
We came home mid-afternoon and enjoyed sitting around and watching TV together.
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