A Year In Pictures ROAD TRIP

June 2020

A North Island roadie starts properly when you get to the desert. I love that road. We don't have a fraction of the southern landscape, but the Desert Road is the real deal. 

I like to make it even more interesting by driving  with one hand while I take photos on my phone. Here’s one I took on our first trip out of lockdown. 

Just kidding. Karren is at the wheel as we make our way south. We have just one intended destination, my parents in Masterton, but we’re also taking a few days to get out on the road now that lockdown’s over. All of it feels good. Even the smallest things you would ordinarily take for granted are freshly good to see. 

Tirau for bacon and eggs and coffee, Putaruru for a zoom call, Taupo for lunch and also some shopping, Huka Falls because what kind of a tourist are you if you don't stop to see if the falls are still there? - and of course they are and they’re still very spectacular. Still impossible to stand there without at some point thinking of cricket’s most unfortunate umpire. 

Also in a Mercy mistress, mercy vein we have been listening to Kathryn Ryan on the drive south and she has been coolly ripping to tiny pieces Michael Woodhouse and his flimsy tissues of evasion. Michelle Boag has this morning belly flopped herself onto the funeral pyre and poor old Todd Muller is sounding a bit dodgy as well. If it weren’t for all the bacon and eggs I would be piling into the popcorn. 

We pull in to Turangi to see my cousin Garth and his wife Leah, but I’ve misunderstood where I’m supposed to be looking for Leah and end up just pissing off pharmacy staff who are taking the covid precautions impressively seriously and get a load of the dipshit Aucklander who hasn’t noticed the orderly line of customers waiting on a rope line. Sorry about that.

On to Taihape. The motel proprietor says things have been steady the whole way through lockdown thanks to truckies needing to have a break there. 

Hello reader Sue Orr. Sue’s Dad has the most memorable Taihape story. Christmas Eve they’ve knocked off shearing and they’re all having a big night in the pub while he waits for the overnight train and it’s all just too much of a good time and whose round is it don't mind if I do and the train pulls into Taihape and he’s still in the pub and it pulls out without him. On it goes, into the night, full of Christmas travelers, on towards Tangiwai. 

There’s not much happening on this Friday evening in June in Taihape but we’re perfectly content, just being out. We stroll the few hundred metres down SH1 to the nearest restaurant. I remember it as the Big Tex place. Big Tex. I loved that chicken. In the early 1970s they were the fanciest of all the takeaway food. There was a Big Tex in Foxton and Paraparaumu and there was one on Cuba Street and I’m pretty sure they arrived before KFC. They called it Chicken Maryland and who the hell knew what Chicken Maryland was? Not me. I just knew that this was delicious deep fried crumbed chicken. Nothing special now but back then a true fast food delicacy and such a flavour. God I loved that chicken

Big Tex is long gone, and the old Taihape place is now a steakhouse and what we learn is that the operators were a success on one of the reality tv chef shows. (Occasionally this comes up, some local tv reference and I have absolutely no clue. Don't care what kind of snob anyone wants to call me, you cannot pay me to be watching TV that way.)

Anyway, great steak, thank you very much. I recommend the steak house in Taihape in the old big Tex place.

It's a simple drive to Masterton from here and which of the scenic routes will we take over the Rangitikei River?  

I like to go in before Ohingaiti and come through Rangiwahia because that's where I spent  teenage summers working on my uncle's farm. But today we're going through Vinegar Hill and we get a very lovely photo which I put on Twitter and friends in America say that’s incredible. Where is this place?

Well yes. I mean just look at it. When you're a kid, views mean nothing but this is about 10k from where I grew up and yes, it’s real pretty there. 

Then into Feilding and let me tell you about the first meat pie I ever had. At Feilding Intermediate on Tuesdays and Thursdays for lunch you could buy a pie for, I don’t know, probably 5 cents. 

These were unbelievably good pies. Perfect pastry, rich filling. prize winners, no question. Anyway they came from the Rosebowl bakery, next to Harry Sidnam the greengrocer on Kimbolton Road: a little skinny shop with a narrow counter, one little window at the front and a million pies in the warmer behind them. And look at them now: same site but all the old buildings are gone, and now the place is huge. 

You could feed a small army here and indeed a small army comes in each day. And this is where I'm taking Karren for breakfast this morning because don’t you worry about Uncle Dave, he knows how to show his wife a good time. 

While we wait for the bacon and eggs and whatnot we watch Feilding have its Saturday morning. There's a table of guys, five of them, all waiting for their mixed grill big breakfast and every one of those dudes has the Fielding stance. Sat back in the chair, arms folded across the  chest like you do in the footy team photo, like you do in the uncomfortable presence of a stranger - that is to say, anybody who isn't you. 

I’ll be lucky to get anyone to talk to me at the high school centenary next year if I’m not careful. But I intend to be there because how can you give your newsletter a name like this and not put that in your year planner? 

On over the saddle road past the wind turbines and down through Wairarapa to Masterton to see mum and dad and it’s lovely and then on we go to Napier driving in the wet and the dark and listening to one of Karren’s favourite American news podcasts and it’s fourteen different accounts of what was done to George Floyd in Minneapolis because this has been an especially terrible few days in the Black Lives Matter protests and you keep hearing I can’t breathe and anguish. So much went so wrong in America last summer and none of it was especially a surprise but the bleakness of it just piled up day upon day. 

We stay put for two days in Napier and so does the rain but that doesn’t matter. Napier still makes us very welcome. Anywhere the rain can’t spoil things is a genuinely good place to go. 

Then on home through more rain and into Tokoroa where the covid precautions in the cafe look a bit of a complete shambles - no one signing in, no one distancing, no screens, nothing really and you think I hope our luck holds. Back on the road and today’s podcast is exploring the batshit crazy world of what’s inside the heads of QAnon people and jesus what complete  morons

Listen to these people, the conspiracists, the trump fanatics, the white supremacists, a gathering madness in the world. Not here, though, not much, not really. Sure we have dickheads like Hosking being wrongheaded for money, encouraging people to have unfounded doubts and sure the Facebook algorithm is doing its best to amplify rabid homegrown conspiracists but what do you see all the way along the road? A country that accepted the threat as real and followed the plan and is able to go about a relatively normal life. How can you not feel good about that?

On we drive, back over the Bombay hills, back to the place of a thousand lovers and a million cars and a team of some millions.