We left the U.S. on Sunday night---but didn’t arrive in Christchurch until Tuesday morning. We had forgotten we would fly over the International Date Line. You lose a day going west, but gain a day on return. (I would live through two Wednesdays a few weeks later.)
The journey from Dulles to Christchurch took about 22 hours, but the trip was uneventful. Dead tired, we arrived at 6:15 a.m. Now in the Southern Hemisphere, we noted the season had changed; it was early fall. The air was a little damp and drizzly and the sky overcast, but it wasn’t raining.
Our first goal was to pick up our rental car and take our first crack at driving on the right side of the road. Things are never as easy as they seem. Certainly our initial experiences with the car weren’t. We picked up our luggage, called the car rental people to pick us up and were off. (There’s always a “however” at this point in my stories.)
However, just as we were ready to drive the dreaded car for the first time, Daryl suddenly realized she didn’t have her car seat cushion---and she couldn’t drive without it. At home she always uses it to elevate her sufficiently to see comfortably over the hood while driving. She had dragged her precious foam seat cushion half way around the world for this reason. But in the crush of picking up luggage and going through customs in Christchurch she had inadvertently forgotten the cushion in the luggage trolley at the airport, she believed.
We had to return!
It’s not simple to locate a lost and found object in a strange airport in a strange country. Take it from me. Driving around our first roundabout (the wrong way) and finding our way back to the airport ranked as #10 on our stress scale.
More importantly, the car seat was nowhere to be found.
By now having gone almost 24 hours with minimal sleep we were totally exhausted and wisely decided we’d just have to manage until we could dig one up later. At this point another unexpected car obstacle surfaced. The car’s steering wheel was on the right, and the usual instruments were transposed, we discovered. The turn signal, especially, gave us immediate grief. Each time we needed to signal a turn, our hand automatically went toward the familiar left side signal---at which point the windshield wipers would blast out a spray of water over the windshield. It took us a couple of days to automatically hit the right hand turn signal. Of course, it also didn’t help when we needed to turn on the windshield wipers in the rain—the turn signal would tick back frustratingly at us.
There were a few other glitches.
As we were just getting started, we couldn’t adjust the outside rear view driver’s mirror to be able to see the road behind while driving. The car had no manual, and we couldn’t find any way to adjust the mirror. Resigned to failure, we headed back to the car rental place for help. When we got there, the shuttle driver was standing in the doorway, smiling. He had just hauled someone back to the airport and recognized the seat cushion abandoned in the sidewalk luggage trolley where we had left it. Returning it to a relieved Daryl, he also pointed out a mysterious hidden button that reset the outside mirror.
We were ready to roll!
After a short rest, we hopped back into our car ready to tackle the journey down the coast. But no! Another false start delayed our plan. The car battery was dead!
I was beginning to think of this as the trip from hell---my ESP had told me so.
Daryl’s calm nature prevailed. We called AA, the NZ version of our AAA. We felt more than a little chagrined when the understanding AA mechanic revealed what the problem was—we had forgotten to turn off the lights when we parked to rest.
That wasn’t the end of our car snafus over the next two weeks.
Once, on a remote mountain road a mysterious red light clicked on signifying potential danger. fortunately, this happened on Easter Sunday morning. After two anxious hours, we spied an open gas station. The kindly gas station attendant showed us a tiny button on the emergency brake that had popped on. No problem. It meant something about the overdrive being on. A few days later, yet a different red light on the dashboard suddenly flashed on and off. It happened just after we had negotiated a highway slump---that's what they call a bump on NZ highway signs. Again, not knowing the problem, we called AA. (I must say they respond more quickly in NZ than in the U.S.—but they were probably very relieved to get rid of those two aging ignorant U.S. drivers!) This AA attendant didn’t even laugh at us! He simply informed us that the blinking light signified the emergency brake had popped on slightly when we bounced over the slump. Just turn off the emergency brake completely, he said.
By the time we departed, we were beginning to behave much like native NZ drivers—except that we refused to drive over 100 km an hour, as many of them did.
[Go to New Zealand Part Five]
