October 18, 2014
Day 53: Near Tahora, NZ
The rain starts again in earnest around 1:00 in the morning and just never stops. It sometimes sounds different as it lands on the caravan roof in varying quantity and force, but it never goes away, not even for a minute. When the dark finally gives way to light we lay in bed listening to the rain and try to think of possible reasons to pack up and return to the road. But all we can imagine is how we'd make it five miles and find ourselves soaked, with more than forty miles of hills big and small still standing between us and the next major town. It takes only a few minutes to decide to make this a rest day.
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We follow up on this choice by spending the next four hours burrowed in the sleeping bag, even though the bed on which it lays is angled in such a way that it feels like we're in a berth on a ship that's run aground. There we alternate between napping, reading, writing, and eating food with such little precision that the bottom layer of the sleeping bag soon fills with crumbs. The most ambitious thing we do all day is to walk a few hundred feet away to take showers and then have tea and a chat with the owners of the campground. It's lazy and wonderful and everything a rest day should be.
By the time we head over to the campground's cooking area in the evening to heat up dinner, every step we take pushes up handfuls of water that soak our shoes and sandals and leaves behind indentations that will still be around for days after we've left. The forecast that I saw a couple of days ago called for half an inch of rain today and it seems like we passed that mark several hours ago.
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I step out of the caravan to add a little more water to the grass some time after 10:00. Sheep noises echo out of the lightless black, because that grass isn't going to eat itself, you know. It still has not stopped raining, almost twenty-four hours after it started. My body gives out a short shiver as I imagine what tomorrow will feel like if the rain continues to stick around.
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