Go Down the Street

Here's another one from New Zealand. Day 4, Thursday March 6, 2008.

We'd been driving for quite some time and it was getting on eight o'clock when we decided to start looking for a place to stay the night. We had already figured out that six was considered late in Dunedin; we hadn't quite pieced together yet that the whole country was like that.

We had spotted a motel or two along the road, but for some reason arrived at the conclusion that we should make it to Invercargill before we stopped for the night.

By the time we got there, it was already dark out. It was about 9:30. The streets were deserted and everything we passed was closed, except for the Pizza Hut and one gas station. We'd already found accommodations in our guidebook that we thought we'd give a go to, now the only trick was to find the place. It was called the Beach Road Holiday Park.

Having no luck finding Beach Road, we stopped into the lone gas station for directions. I complimented the clerk on his hair color (blue), and he presented me with a handy map of the whole city, and showed me where the Beach Road Holiday Park was. It was not on Beach Road. In fact, it was several kilometers away from Beach Road. It wasn't even, strictly speaking, in Invercargill.

So we traveled the ten or so kilometers to our destination. Upon arrival, we (no surprise) found the office closed. Helpfully, there was a note taped to the door which stated that we could help ourselves to a tent or powered site, or for a tourist flat or a cabin, we should call one of these numbers. So i wrote down these numbers, since a cabin was what we were looking for, and we drove back to Invercargill in hopes of finding a payphone at the Pizza Hut. We were, after all, ravenously hungry, having not officially eaten since breakfast. We were surviving on chicken-flavored potato chips and Pods (Pods: little scoops of cookie with drops of well-known candy bars in their center, such as Milky Way or Three Musketeers).

The Pizza Hut may, in fact, have been closing when we arrived, but they served us anyway. They did not have a payphone, but the lady at the counter was kind enough to let me use their phone in the manager's office. Calling those numbers proved to be of no avail, so i inquired of the clerk whether she knew of any hotels, motels, hostels, or whatever else in the area which might still have an open lobby.

"You're going to have to talk to this guy," she said, pointing at a delivery driver who was just entering the building. If i remember correctly, he was a gaunt man with a backwards baseball hat and a long goatee. The remainder of his face appeared to be a couple days out from a shave, and he may have been missing some teeth. His name was Carl. I explained our predicament.

"Well, there's this place, this place, this place..." He rattled off the names of the area's lodgings as though he were reading a phone book. When he ran out of names to rattle off, he produced an actual phone book from behind the counter, and pulled out some more names. Then, he shocked us: "Do you want me to call some of these places for you?"

"Um...yeah, that would be great," i stammered out in my surprise. And he proceeded to do so.

After placing three unsuccessful calls, he said, "Well, maybe you can drive over to some of these places, and hopefully there will be somebody there." He started to give me directions, but must have realized quickly that i had no idea what he was talking about. So he reached over to the receipt printer and pulled out a long strip of paper. He wrote out the directions to four area motels, and sent us on our way.

Amanda, who had been driving all day, since it was her turn in the rotation, crawled into the back of Lucy, our van, and collapsed from exhaustion. I took over the driving duties, and Alyssa attempted to navigate me from Carl's poorly-written directions. We were so tired, and things were getting worse at a rate which could only be described as "exponential." We were approaching delirious by the time we reached the third motel, which was also closed. Alyssa got to the fourth and final item on the strange list, and adopted a quizzical expression. She was mouthing something silently to herself.

"What does it say?" i asked.

"It says, 'Don Street, Go,'" she answered.

"That doesn't make any sense," i said. I pulled over so that i could take a look at it. It did, in fact, read 'Don St, Go."

We sat there for a large number of minutes, trying to figure out what the hell Don St, Go could possibly mean. No cars passed us.

"I think it means, 'go down the street,'" i offered. "What's the next line?"

"Right then."

"...Right then?"

So, i continued to go down the street. At some point, we ended up in a roundabout where i just kept circling and circling, because we didn't know what to do and we were losing coherence fast. Amanda woke up at this point and saw the street light going around and around through the sunroof, and said, "You guys, what's going on?"

"Nothing, Amanda, go back to sleep!" Alyssa interjected urgently. Amanda was quick to take this advice. Alyssa would later attribute this quick response to averting some sort of disaster.

Alyssa and i were giggling profusely enough to hurt by now, because the whole Don Street thing seemed to be about the most ridiculous notion in the history of mankind. If there was a joke funnier than, "Don Street, Go! Right then!," we have probably become incapable of laughing at it, because Don Street is the only joke that matters anymore. We continued reciting this line at varying volume levels which would make Spinal Tap jealous as Amanda continued to slumber.

We'd probably driven down every major artery in Invercargill five or six times before, by some miracle of a more amusing god, we passed by Don Street. And we were both like, "OH MY GOD! DON STREET!!" So i said, "Right then!" and we took a right on Don Street. We happened across the intersection of Don and Spey, which was also mentioned on the receipt. We finally found the motel in question, and it was closed.

I was just about done for, so when i saw that grocery store, i didn't hesitate. Alyssa had already dropped off on me, now that a navigator was futile. I pulled into a parking stall at the edge of the parking lot, equidistant from the door and the street.

Of all the fucking things to be open at that time of night.

Yes, customers were coming and going from the grocery like it was a Saturday morning. I sat in the driver's seat with my eyes shut for a good long while, hoping that unconsciousness would claim me and i could just be held accountable for whatever happened next at some time in the future, preferably at least six hours. But when i was still awake twenty minutes later and somebody got into the SUV parked next to us, i knew it wasn't going to work out. I started up Lucy and drove another ten kilometers before i called it a night.

But as far as where the Beach Road Holiday Park hides their tent sites, i will never know. I cautiously slunk down their roads into their dead ends, hoping Lucy's lights wouldn't wake anybody, but it just wasn't happening. Finally i found a clearing, quite wide open, with a tree right in the middle of it. I got off the road and pulled up right next to that tree, and i said this is it.

Dawn's first rays woke me peacefully, and i decided that i needed to get the fuck out of there. Amanda and Alyssa were still asleep, but since i was already in the driver's seat, that mattered little. i just wanted to get out of there before whoever owned that house asked why i was parked on their lawn.

Here's where i started to muse about the downward spiral we'd been on. Our first night in New Zealand, we'd splurged on this expensive hotel with more amenities than i had previously though humanly possible. The second night was in a cramped little hostel room with community kitchen and bath facilities. The third night was spent in a tent on the hard ground with the wind blowing the walls into our faces all night. And now the fourth night, we had slept in the god damn van. If things kept going like this, the fifth night we would lose the van and be huddled in a ditch, hoping to avoid that tornado, and the sixth night we would be dead.

Things improved from there.