So, as I was saying earlier...

Anne and I were driving out of Christchurch, chiming in with the radio on the "swing!"s and laughing our heads off already. Before I tell you all about our adventures, I first have to tell you just how cool Anne is. She was awesome to travel with! To start, it is so excellent to be travelling with another south Minneapolis native, who knows all the old south high slang. I'll exclaim about how dope the view is and she'll respond that the view from the B-side is just as stupendous. And her exceedingly correct response to my question of "Are you ready?": "To RUM-BLE!" After just a happily startled pause on my part, we both broke into singing jock jams on the side of a mountain on the Routeburn track. Gotta love it. She also appreciates the Sound of Music as much as I do, and although she didn't join me in twirling around on the mountaintops (her loss), she enthusiastically participated in a road trip sing-a-long with my thrift-store-find Sound of Music soundtrack tape. Not to mention that she would randomly break out singing "high on a hill was a lonely goatherd..." This was followed by a little G Love "Baby's Got Sauce." We have eclectic taste - what can I say?! Have I yet mentioned her preoccupation with roadkills? I was worried about this at first, because of a family event all those years ago, which transpired only because mom was not there to lend her better judgement to the idea of taking a roadkill raccoon, putting it in a garbage bag, and bringing it to my Aunt Betty's land in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to bury it and come back to dig up the skeleton in a couple years. Meredith was very into skeletons at the time. Well, that whole operation didn't go quite as planned. I hadn't been so excited about this idea from the start, not being quite as taken with skeletons as Meredith and definitely not as excited about the idea of riding around with a dead raccoon in the back of the car. Dad got the raccoon into the car, but we hadn't gone very far before he figured out that it wasn't quite as fresh as he'd thought. He pulled over and dumped it, but not wanting to litter, he put the plastic garbage bag that had been holding it back in the car. As you can imagine, driving with a not-so-fresh roadkilled raccoon in the back of the car didn't make things smell so sweet, so we rolled down all the windows. This influx of breeze began to circulate the air in the car a little more violentely than expected, and we ended up with me screaming in the front seat, the dead-raccoon bag wrapped around me and pinned there by the wind. I don't remember how we restrained the bag (or mollified me), but I do remember quite clearly pulling over at the next gas station, where dad pulled over to throw the bag in the garbage. So with this as my main road kill memory, I was a little hesitant about Anne's fascination with the squashed and flattened creatures on the side of the road. Luckily, she wasn't planning to be here in a couple years, so she didn't try any roadkill burials using my car as the hearse. And to admit, I did get into the little game of identifying the various stoats, possums and pukekos that lined the sides of the road. We even saw a dead hawk next to another dead blob of something. Anne was impressed with the quality of the roadkill here, saying that they had a high "splat factor." I can only guess that that may be due to the high speed limits on the highways we were traversing.