Throw Back Thursday. 1982 - New Zealand. Felix Acree, Bob McNutt. Long story. Left warm, tropical Tahiti (in shorts and tshirts) for the north island of New Zealand... where it was sub-freezing and sleeting. Rented a car and toured the island for 3 or 4 days. As you can see in the pastoral scene, New Zealand is sheep country. In fact, sheep outnumber people 22 to 1! Though I understand that number has come down quite a bit since this visit in 82. Very sparsely populated with big expanses of just open land. (They filmed Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit here.) Saw the volcanic mud pots and hot springs of Rotorua - swam in the hot springs. Experienced the Glow Worm Caves (it looks like stars!) of Waitomo. The black pebble volcanic beaches of Hawkes Bay. And the two largest lakes on the north island. The deepest lake at around 800 ft, Lake Waikaremoana (Maori for rippling water - basically, each letter is pronounced, so this is a seven syllable word... Felix and Bob could never get it right.) And Lake Taupo, the largest lake in the north island - 240 sq miles - a caldera formed by a massive volcanic explosion. The upside down car, and the Kiwi couple are the exclamation point to our NZ visit. Driving high up on the ice-covered mountain road that overlooks Waikaremoana, we lost control of the car on a sharp ice-covered curve and flew off the road. Had that stand of trees not caught the car there, the drop just beyond was maybe 800 feet straight down to the lake. Since our trip was in July, it was, of course, dead winter there. So no one was driving this high up in the mountains. After waiting a long time for someone to drive by and help us, we ended up hiking back down to a fishing camp where we met this couple. Again... because it was deep winter, they were the only two in the entire camp. But they took us in, warmed us up, and fed us mutton stew. We called a tow truck which took two hours to get to us and maybe three or more to get us hauled out and back to Auckland (4 of us riding in the tow truck cab). This little adventure took all night. Got back to the hotel around 4 a.m. Of course, we missed our flight to Australia the next morning... but the fairy tale ending was we had purchased insurance on the rental car prior, so we literally dropped the totaled car off at Hertz and went on about our way - no questions asked.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 16:01:10 +0000
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