The 70 Dollar Mistake

Last I wrote we were waiting for the clouds to part in New Plymouth. New Plymouth is a pretty big NZ city with shopping malls, tall buildings, a haze of smog and a fancy, but not very helpful i-site (information center). It is also a free-camping void. I had noticed the absence of little blue tents—the Atlas’ symbol for “informal campgrounds”—for about a hundred km in any direction from New Plymouth. But, I thought, surely we can just park on the road, or ask at the i-site about informal informal-campsites. Either way we wouldn’t spend too much time near the city, New Plymouth existed merely as a gateway to Egmont National Park. We would spend the days hiking in the shadow of Mt. Egmont. Ha! Forget it! We were cursed with rain and a 5-day forecast of dripping clouds.

The 5 days could not be borne for we had nowhere to live in the meantime. Our first, and last night, in New Plymouth left both of us law-abiding fools freaked out. It started out promising enough, when we landed on the outskirts of a small suburb at a town park looking out over the ocean. Families wandered past with their dogs, workers stopped in their cars to watch the sun set before heading home and we even had a picnic table to eat at. A friendly American couple (a doctor and a school teacher here with their four kids for at least five years, but maybe forever) eased our conscience. Sure we could camp out here, there’s no one who monitors the area and everyone breaks the rules on the board all the time—those families with dogs on the path for a start. At about 8:30pm as we watched the end of our movie, some guy pulled up in a truck, his headlights beaming into our car, he parked and we heard a knock on the glass. Move along, this is private land…Eep.

We moved to a row of parking spots across from the beach under the watchful eye of up-scale houses on a hill. Streetlights bathed us in orange light, I lay with my complimentary JetBlue eyemask squishing my eyelashes and flinched every time someone walked past. We survived the night. In fact I think we were incredibly safe in this quiet, upper-class suburb but we were rattled from our brush with the law.

The next morning I took my freezing shower and we walked along New Plymouth’s coastal walkway…

Once the rains came we hid out in the library and used their free internet, or tried to, so patchy was the signal. After about 4 hours of reading and dilly-dallying we faced a decision. Where will we stay the night and do we want to stay in this un-captivating city for five nights on the chance the weather icons of the future will show blazing suns? At 6pm that night we decided to flee New Plymouth, accept it as a waste of gas (a lot to swallow at 70$ a tank) and move along.

We came full circle back to Wanganui and spent a couple nights in a lovely, but windy, free campsite on the beach. Ahhhh.