Our Outing on My First Monday Here

In New Zealand we’re enjoying a school break for these next two weeks. Thus many children, including my grandson, like to get together with friends for play dates. So I was happy to accompany my daughter and our little guy on his first visit to a new friend’s house. Since our entire country is covered for the entire week in ominous rain clouds and it is definitely winter here now and Julie was unsure of the route to their home, since it was a fair distance from ours, we anticipated a shorter play time than might normally be the case, so we could go back home and hunker down inside by the fire. The mother who invited us has 5 children and I anticipated a great time would be enjoyed by all. That was what we hoped for anyway. 

So Julie quickly used her GPS travel thingamabob and we were off. We were going in a slightly unfamiliar direction but she had a general idea of where this house was. I snapped as many pictures as I could with my phone as we whizzed past some gorgeous rural scenery and the rain was barely a drizzle at that point. Eventually we arrived at Rose Street and looked for number 6 like sleuths on a case. Finding it at last, Julie attempted to turn around on the grass verge in front of the fence but that was so slippery from the constant inundation this month that we skied into the slight rise. Thinking she could back out of that predicament she accelerated and turning the wheels she managed to get us further into the muddy sodden ground as the wheels spun around and around without any traction. They looked like they’d been turned into cake dough in a gigantic mixer since they were dripping with a covering of light brown liquefied mud. In time we decided to exit the car and Julie mentioned quietly that we’d deal with this later. At least we’d arrived I thought and tried to remember where to put a piece of wood so we could escape our very green grass prison with the hood of the car kissing the slight rise, as if stuck for eternity in that ditch. But we trudged forward. We’d handle that later.

The house had a short driveway that we should have parked on and then a gate and a narrow but deep yard. We approached the gorgeous taupe colored chickens huddled on the stoop by the front door (like my chickens at my door and Julie’s chooks at her door, trying to get out of this weather) but they left en mass without me photographing them…thinking I could do that later during the visit. Elijah kept saying that they must be home since many shoes were by the door that proved that many people lived in that residence. But Julie replied that they had to go on a short errand and might not be there when we got there. Hmm, why didn’t that feel right to me? Asking someone over and then not being home for their arrival did seem a trifle odd at best. But instead of texting the friend’s mother right away, we waited patiently and used the doorknocker just in case there was life inside aside from the dogs on the other side of the door. I kept eyeing their pile of logs as potential fodder to put behind our front tires, but figured that they weren’t flat enough to actually help us out of our predicament. In time my daughter found an empty pizza box and an old rubber mat, which started my burgeoning laughter at the situation we found ourselves in, but it was going to get far more hilarious in a mere few minutes and although it wasn’t exactly raining it was quite cold and dark. As the time passed my girl decided she had to ring her mate and tell him what was going on or in this case not going on. He was too far away at work to save us from this few inches of a hill that we were stuck into but knew someone nearby who might be available. She also rang the woman and told her that we were outside of her house but she wasn’t there. The woman said, “Oh dear,” and went outside to check where we were. A minute later the good news came. “I’ve been outside and you’re not outside here. Are you sure you have the right house, number 6 Rose Street, in Waipawa?” Then it hit us. We were in Waipukerau at number 6 Rose Street, which was a few miles away from Waipawa.

So there we were. Dressed for a quick play date, outside some stranger’s house in the wrong neighborhood, as we awaited the arrival of what we thought was the owner and her children. It was hard to grasp at first but it was to get even more interesting as the real owner of the dogs inside slowly approached the scene of the paralyzed car as we looked hopelessly lost on the side of the road outside her house. She, as it turned out, had come home to use the restroom, and found us instead and our naughty car. Smiling from ear to ear, she got out of her car and walked over to inspect the dilemma we found ourselves in. Still grinning she said that this happens a lot whenever the ground is really saturated and showed us the many previous marks on the ground where various drivers had driven into the muddy bank. 

This called for a real rescue. So a good friend was notified of the emergency. He was about 20 minutes away and had a rescue vehicle that was used in his business, a paramedic type of truck that looked like a cross between an ambulance and a tow truck. The funny thing is that when he found the screw to insert to plug into the threads under the boot of the car, to hook up the rope so he could pull us out, it wouldn’t screw in. So without skipping a beat, my 7 year-old grandson said proudly that he needed to turn the screw in the other direction, having noticed some line on the screw, he knew within a nanosecond how to thread it. I just stood there with utter amazement having never seen that particular part of any car in such an intimate and important moment. So in the hour and a half that we were there freezing our asses off and wondering how in the world we were going to extricate ourselves from this problematic parking, we waited impatiently as we discovered more information, like the actual facts, and we were biding our time looking at the two magnificently muddied highland cattle in the enormous paddock next to the wrong number 6 house. After a few minutes inside her house, the wrong house, the woman came out of her house, which was her right house, with a couple of pieces of silver beet for Elijah to feed to Marcy, aged 7 and Misty, aged 4. They’d traveled the width of the paddock near the fence to come inspect these idiots that were looking at them in such inclement weather. Even they were probably thinking, ‘Oh, here’s a few more dummies that got stuck here, hurry, let’s look ferocious as we walk over to them.’

At some point after much hilarity we got to the right house in the right town. As I suspected there were kids everywhere, hanging upside down from a tree house structure outside and in every nook and cranny inside. The house in comparison to the wrong house was wonderfully old fashioned and stuffed with books and handmade creations and toys and life and had so much to admire we felt so happy to have finally gotten there. Their wonderful mother had made us a hot lunch of her three sisters stew, which after being outside in the rough seemed doubly delicious along with the cut up apples, carrots, variety of dips and crackers and such on her thick slab of a dining table that was quite beautiful and sturdy enough for the onslaught of her brood.  We laughed some more and even she knew about that other house and that woman we met, since on occasion she has had to pick up misdelivered packages that ended up there instead of at her house.

Gosh. Just like us, misdirected packages that ended up there. And instead of a short visit we made up for lost time and stayed much later than expected and then left Elijah there for Daddy to pick up on the way

home. He had so much fun playing with his new pal he hardly noticed we were gone.