Blue Boat Home

Feeling much better rested on Saturday morning, we took a bus to the Auckland Zoo. There we saw native wildlife, including a kiwi and a kea, and some Australian animals as well, finishing around noon. Afterward we decided to split up for the day and meet up back at the hotel in the evening.

We woke tired and sore and were unable to get the stove to light and decided over breakfast to return the campervan early and get a hotel. There was no refund, but it was worth it to have a comfortable place to rest! Jessie booked us at the Roomie Apartment Hotel, which was very roomy — although there were only dishes for two in the kitchen, there were three sinks! While unpacking my boots, Jessie made a joke about how we'd brought them halfway around the world to get them cleaned.

Jessie was not ready to leave Rotorua without seeing more of the geothermal attractions, so we went to Whakarewarewa, which has been a tourist attraction since before colonization and is now a "living Māori village," meaning that people live there to learn and teach pre-colonial customs. We did not tour the village, but we had a lovely scenic walk on the trails past steaming and bubbling pools.

Weds, June 26

We checked out of the hotel and took another Uber to the Jucy campervan rental where I had reserved a van for the remainder of our time in NZ, thinking that we would see the countryside before returning to Auckland. We each took a turn driving on our way to the Hobbiton movie set. We had a very nice tour and took lots of photos. 

Tues, June 25

We were squashed together quite tight in the middle of the central row of four seats, and the position of the seat legs meant that we couldn't both have our bags in front of us, but we slept for most of the flight anyway. They served us three meals spaced about four hours apart — the last of which was breakfast — and Jessie and I made a point of ordering different things so we could share.

A bit of background: we initially planned to take this trip in 2023, but with one thing and another postponed it to 2024, which is our 15th anniversary. We started planning months in advance, since we had only two weeks to work with, we wanted to fit in all the activities we cared about while leaving some flexibility. I booked the flights and the campervan rental, and Jessie booked the hotels and car rental. I mention these details because they are relevant later.

Are we really ready to revisit 2020? Here goes...

As I recall, the assignment for this 1997 poem was just to make an analogy between two things. I chose to compare moral relativism (which I was enamored with at the time, being 21) with a Möbius strip, and I thought it would be clever to turn the poem in on a Möbius strip so that there was no clear start or end point. It took some doing to get the sides of the paper to line up (since we had to print, not hand-write, our assignments) and to get the splice in the middle of a line so that readers couldn't assume it was the starting point.

Written for a poetry class in 1997, this is a reflection on the proverb "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" and the joke attributed to Groucho Marx, "Absence makes the heart go yonder." It may go without saying that I was in a long-distance relationship at the time.

The following lyrics were written to be background music (by imaginary band Mendelion Seeds) for my 1992 novella "First Person." They were meant to be a synthesis of "Your Wildest Dreams" by the Moody Blues, "Portrait of the Lady as a Young Artist" by Sea Train, and "Perfect Lover" by Kansas. I intentionally chose a very tricky rhyme scheme (ABCBDDDEBE) and rhythm (trochaic for the first four lines of each stanza alternating 8 and 6 feet, then anapestic quadrameter for the rest), and I found the structure helped.