Unknown Destination

April 27, 2019 0 By Joanna Mosenson

I’m drunk. It’s 7:30 PM on a Sunday. Before you go and judge me, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, and I spent the day in Melbourne reuniting with my Delta Family. More about that on a later date but what’s important for now is that I was drunk and I had to do something that’s very hard for me to do. I had to leave the bar BEFORE closing. BEFORE the lights came on. BEFORE my friends. BEFORE I was ready. I had a flight to catch. Drunkenly, I managed to hop in an uber back to my hotel, gather my luggage, get back in the uber, get to the airport, check in, stumble through security, find my gate and board my 11:55 PM flight to Auckland, New Zealand. How I managed to do this? I’m not quite sure. Those few hours are hazy, really hazy. But I did it. The flight was not ideal. I usually get my best sleep in airplanes, hunched over like a clam turning the tray table into my personal pillow (perks of being fun sized), but not this time. This time I flew Jetstar. Where the space between seats is too small for even the smallest of humans. I can’t really complain though. JetStar did what it was supposed to do. Get me to my destination safely. And it did just that. Getting to my next destination, the camper van, wasn’t as easy.

I should have asked more questions before I arrived in New Zealand. I knew I was supposed to meet the Berrys at the campervan pickup location and I had the address of where that was. But that was it. Sally never gave me any information on the company or the reservation, and I never asked. It wasn’t a problem at first when I got in the cab and gave the driver the destination address, until he told me there was a free shuttle to that location. Free things are my favorite things, so I obviously had to find this free shuttle. He didn’t know the name of the company but pointed to a location about a block away from where I was sitting in his taxi and said, “it’s somewhere over there”. So I got out of the taxi, grabbed my rucksack from the trunk and headed towards where he pointed. I didn’t ask him any other questions because I assumed like most other airports, finding the shuttle wouldn’t be rocket science. Apparently I was wrong. I spent the next hour walking back and forth trying to find a free shuttle for a company I did not know the name of. Asking dozens of people for help finding said shuttle. Each one sending me to different areas of the terminal pickup with a 46-pound bag on my back and 2 carry-on bags in my hands. I was about to give up. I was exhausted and the bags were starting to really weigh me down. For some reason I decided to ask one more person. That person was a man about to get in his van. The van had some kind of rental car company logo on it. I hoped he’d be the one who could help me find the camper van company and shuttle I was looking for. He wasn’t, but what he did was even better. He looked at the location I was trying to get to and offered to drive me there. He said it was close to his rental company location and he didn’t mind. I thought we’d wait a bit for more travelers to need his services too, but he took my bags, helped me into the van and we were on our way. Just me and him. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind that instead of this man taking me where I needed to go, he was about to abduct me, and I’d be another female traveler statistic. But I like to believe the world has more good people than bad and luckily, I took a chance on one of the good ones. I only knew this for sure when we arrived at the Travellers Autobarn location and there was a sign on the wall saying “Travellers Autobarn Welcome Sally.” In that moment, I took a sigh of relief. Once again I survived a ride as a solo woman and I was grateful; grateful for his kindness and generosity providing me the free shuttle I was hoping to find, taking a risk with his own company, deviating from his route and taking me to his company’s competitors location. But mostly, I was grateful to see a warehouse filled with camper vans that I could lie down in because it was not even 8 in the morning and I was still exhausted.

Flash forward 2 hours later, post nap and the Berrys finally arrive at the Travellers Autobarn pick up location. After signing the rental agreement and deciding to spend too much money on caravan insurance, we were on our way to explore this country I knew nothing about. We had no plan. Not really anyway, so we decided to park the camper randomly in the city of Auckland and commence our Mosen-Berry (get it, like boysenberry?) Adventures walking around the town in search of the Sky Tower. This city was like no place I had ever been before. The hills were out of control. There was no flat land I could see but just tons and tons and TONS of hills-in the middle of a city! It was wild, and my leg muscles were ill prepared for the workout I was accidentally subjecting them too. I truly don’t know how anyone learns to ride a bike around here. Seriously, it’s just not possible. But while I was struggling I looked behind me and saw Sally’s almost 4-year-old daughter, Maddie, making her way through the up hill climb. If she could do it, so could I. And we did, together, all the way up to the Sky Tower. A 328-meter high staple in the city of Auckland with 360-degree views of this unusual city. We walked around the 200-meter high sky deck getting a bird’s eye view of a city we only had time to be in for a few hours. While admiring the city and getting acquainted with my new mini friend Maddie whom I had only met for a few hours one other time, we saw a man falling before our eyes after jumping off of the building. My heart sank to my stomach. With screams and his body flailing, in that split second I could think of nothing but this poor man jumping to his death, and Maddie and I bearing witness to it. Until I realized he was attached to a cord🤦🏻‍♀️. He wasn’t committing suicide, he was just crazy enough to do the SKYJUMP and fly off of the tallest building in New Zealand! Once my heart returned to my chest, I could appreciate the sheer awesomeness of what that man just did and what I would never in a million years do, and Maddie, Sally, and her husband Vince and I watched in awe of the next brave soul to do the same descent.

Unfortunately it was getting late and we had to find a place to spend our first night in New Zealand. So down we went, on one of the cooler elevators I’ve been on. Standing on a glass bottom floor allowing us to look at what was below us through each of the 220-meters we went down until we reached the street level.

It wasn’t long until we were back in our camper and driving in search of a cheap place to stay the night. We landed upon Murphy’s Law Irish Bar in Drury, NZ which had a cheap camper van area behind the pub. It wasn’t much, but perfect for what we were looking for. We set up camp and made some dinner. Though easy enough to set up, it was both the first and last time we ate a meal on the table in the camper. We then had some drinks outside with some other campers, getting ideas on where we should travel next. It wasn’t too late but after lack of sleep and a full day of traveling, we were ready to head to bed. So with Maddie and Vince on the top bed and Sally and I on the bottom, we all went to bed so we would be bright eyed and bushy tailed for what was coming next.