My Life in Motueka

I wrote this up earlier when I was in Motueka, so I'll just type it in as I had it written, but don't be fooled by the present tense - I've done a lot since then! Things have been chill here in Motueka, being that the greater part of my days have been spent picking fruit (and chucking the unacceptable specimens at my fellow crew members!). Notice how I did not use the word "unsuspecting" when describing said crew members, since we all very well expected to have fruit launched at us from time to time. Especially when walking under a tree where someone was picking. That was one of the drawbacks of working the bottoms of the trees: its much easier to accurately drop fruit on people from above than it is to throw it up and hit them from below. The tangle of branches have a bad habit of getting in the way and diverting your aim as well as diminishing any forward momentum of the pears. The branches don't have such a marked effect on the way down, unfortunately. I usually had to wait until they came down to empty their picking sack into the bins on the tractor. Thats when I had my best opportunity for stealth attacks between the tree trunks. After hours, I've been hanging out back at my campsite, which I've been sharing with an English guy named Steve. He's been living here in New Zealand for a while and is down here working in a fruit packing house at the moment. We've been making shared dinners with Mark, another guy in the site next to us, since its much easier and more fun to cook for multiple people. I've got a bit of a problem though, because Steve looks like Dr. Green from ER, so I keep wanting to call him Mark, which luckily I've avoided so far, since that might lead to some mass confusion and embarassment for me. My other tent neighbor is a guy named Peter. He's from New Zealand, but has spent a lot of time fruit picking over in Australia as well. We got to talking since I was noticing his road bike, a bit enviously, I'll admit. The guy is amazing. He get up, goes for a swim, picks apples, does a long bike ride after work and then swims again in the evening. Can we say energy much? Oh. And he plays violin. Jeez. Most people, including myself, come back from a day of picking and hang out, make their dinner and go to bed. So compare and contrast those two scedules there. Yeah, the guys has got some energy! He's really into the Outward Bound stuff though, and said I should look into doing some of that... sounds good to me! He also told me about the saltwater pools where he swims down at the beach near our campsite. Our pool here at the campground is large to play in but not quite up to lap-swimming size. It would be excellent for practicing flip-turns though. I figured on Saturday I'd go down and check out this saltwater pool and have myself a little workout. Well, Saturday rolled around and I was quite homesick. The travelling thing gets tome from time to time. I don't want to cook out of the trunk of my car anymore! I've got so many plastic bags in there, its a headache to find anything, even though I have them all sorted and organized and neatly arranged (as is possible with a bunch of plastic shopping bags). I have my breakfast food bag, my tupperware and cookware bag, my snacks, my dinner ingredients, my nonperishables, my fruits and veggies, my wash liquid and sponge, plus extra plastic bags all on the left side of my trunk. On the right side is my file folder with all of my important info, my plastc bags full of journals, books, cameras, film, scarves, jewelry, shower stuff, dirty laundry and all sorts of little odds and ends. In the middle are my Granite Gear compression sacks full of my various articles of clothing: outdoor and sports gear in the large red one, heavier clothes in the medium blue one, and smaller things like t-shirts, socks and underwear in the small purple one. Thats how its supposed to work, anyway. In practice, the blue and purple bags tend to get mixed up a bit. Keeping all of your clothes in 3 bags may not seem like a big sacrifice to many of you, but for me, who normally keeps even my underwear neatly folded and arranged just so in my dreser drawer, having to dig unceremoniously through 2 bags in the trunk of my car, fishing around for something down at the bottom that might feel like the t-shirt I'm loooking for is not one of my favorite pastimes. At least the t-shirts are better than the socks. Those seem to have a habit of consistently coming up as only one of the pair. Then I have to fish down back into the depths of my bag, trying to remember where my hand first encountered the other half of the pair before the struggle of pulling it up through the layers of shirts, jeans and undies. Oh the sacrifices I make for the sake of travel! :) Dang! I got a bit off track there. Right, so I was talking about swimming. And I decided that a swim would be a good idea to take my mind off homesickness. I didn't really feel like going swimming. I'd stayed up late (past midnight!... didn't make it 'til one though...) with my picking crew at Hot Mama's the night before, hanging out and listening to a band for a while. So my energy level wasn't at max. I got all suited and sunscreend up, threw on my sweats since there was a chill in the air, grabbed my towel, goggles, watch and waterbottle, and hopped into my ccar to head down to the pool. When I arrived, it of course was even chillier since the wind was stronger down on the beach. I bravely took off my clothes and stepped down onto the first stair under the water. Whoa! Stop right there! I stepped back UP from that first stair in the water, first of all because it is cold and second of all because there are FISH in the pool! I knew it was filled up by the water at high tide, but somehow I wasn't expecting it to have sea life in it. I alked around the edge, taking a surreptitious, but thorough look to make sure that there weren't any other, more hazardous, marine creatures lurking about. Sorry, but you never know! I could just see myself backstrocking right into a jellyfish or something. I saw plenty of seaweed and what looked like some barnacles, so I determined that even though it didn't quite quite fit my usual definition of a lap pool, at least it was safe. Then I fell to the task of convincing myself to get in the water. After checking over the wading pool as well, I stodd mid-calf in its slightly warmer water, leaning on the wooden railing separating the two pools, looking down into that big, cement fishpond full of cold water, trying to convince myself to get in. Eventually, my logical half won out. I KNEW I'd feel better if I got in a good workout. So before I could change my mind, I popped on my goggles, checked their suction, (I didn't want any of that salt water in my eyes), and dove in... yes, all the way under, head and all. After that first shock, I'm already used to it. The pool looked about as big as the pool at the Midtown Y at home, only without the pretty turquoise tiles and lane lines. When I called it a cement fishpond earlier, I was not being disparaging. It truly was just a concrete basin filled up by the tides each day. It is 36 laps to the mile at home, so I figured I'd do my usual workout, mixing up strokes and intensities so I'd get a little of everything. And man, it felt good! By the time I'd reached 20 laps, I was going strong and didn't want to stop. I did, however, stop at 36 laps, because the pool was in the direct sunlight and I wasn't sure how well I'd done with my self-application of sunscreen on my back. I drove home absolutly glowing, feeling so strong and refreshed. I left those poor little fish in peace. They were probably grateful to have this gigantic land creature finally leave them alone after barging through their midst 72 times in a row. When I went to bed, I fell asleep happily with that post-workout ease of happy sleepiness. I think I started feeling it a bit early, since I woke up in the morning wearing my pajama top backwards. I obviously hadn't noticed when I put it on the night before. Whoops.