A Rough Trip and A Good Yarn

Setting: a sports bar in downtown Welly. Kraemer and I are out with some of the guys from work, grabing a beer and watching the Wellington Lions (local rugby team) win their way into the national championship match. We're talking about which players we have man-crushes on ("Oooh, I love that dude. He really hits hard."). My buddy Suren is with us. He's a 4th generation South African of Indian descent and therefore is full of great tales about growing up in apartheid S. Africa with brown skin. He and Strewn (Kiwi guy) start swapping tales about their favorite rugby players of all time when Suren says, "Hey, remember Buck Shelford? He was a right tough bastard, eh?"

Strewn: "Oh yeah, I remember that time he got his testicle rucked out-"

Full Stop.

Kraemer and I make that face that all guys make when they hear something like this, and I ask him to repeat what he just said. Strewn says, "Oh yeah, he was really something, eh, one time he got his testicle ripped out in a ruck. He got the team doc to put it back and stitch up his scrotum and then he played the second half of the match."

I had a hard time believing this so I looked it up. It's true. Strewn left out the fact that old Buck apparently lost a couple of teeth in addition to part of his reproductive gear, but he did manage to keep playing. Yikes.

On to a less painful matter: our family trip from hell.

That's not a skirt.

Remember that family trip from your childhood that went completely awry? For me it was a road trip to Hana (a city in Hawaii). Ask anyone in my family about it and they'll fill you in. Anyway, I was on the other end of one of these about two weeks ago. It seemed simple on paper; one of the best rock climbing spots in NZ is just across Wellington harbor and it's located on a beach. I figured that we could all cram into the car, drive about 40 minutes, hike another 15 along the beach (crossing a small stream), and the kids could play in the sand while Kraemer and I climbed.

I'll sum it up from there as quickly as possible (deep breath): Amelia and Amy got carsick and Amelia puked about 2 minutes before we reached the parking lot and then the stream turned out to be about 8 feet deep where we wanted to cross and I got soaked looking for a better spot to cross and then Amelia peed in her pants and had to wear my boxer shorts (the only thing still dry) and Quinn ate a lot of sand and we never made it to the rocks and then Quinn got carsick and puked on the way home and by then I'd run out of things with which to clean up puke because everything was already covered in puke or pee.

The good news is that everyone, including the kids, maintained a Pollyana-grade cheery attitude throughout the whole ordeal and it really turned into something quite funny.

Quinn finally stopped crapping gravel about a week later, and Amelia seems to have a rather rosy recollection of the trip. Someone at school asked her what she had been up to over the weekend. "I went to the beach," she beamed, "and I got to throw up."

Editor's note: The frequency of blog postings shows no signs of increasing any time soon, unfortunately; our friends Sarah and Danny have arrived and we're heading to the South Island this weekend to tramp through Abel Tasman park. I've been hoarding vacation time and I'm taking the whole month of January off, so that adds up to 40+ days of vacation between now and February. I'll post when I can!