Days 39-45: Time For Plan B

Well, we are still in Hamilton. We've been off the trail for about 10 days now, and are starting to feel a bit fat and out of shape after suddenly becoming so sedentary for so long. We are really itching to get back on the trail, but unfortunately it looks like we'll probably be taking a few weeks off.


We broke down and saw a doctor while we were here, after several days of little improvement in the foot pain. The best guess diagnosis we got is either a bone bruise or a stress fracture in Liz's third metatarsal. Nothing showed up on the xray, but stress fractures are generally not visible on xrays until several weeks after they happen. Either way, it sounds like it will take at least several weeks to recover. On the bright side, our visit ended up only costing $30, including an xray. My expectations of socialized medicine were set by Fox News, but, shockingly, we didn't encounter a single death panel or months-long waiting list for care.

Nervously awaiting xray results in the doctor's office

Looks like a normal foot... so why does it still hurt?

We spent a few days trying to tell ourselves "let's just go in a few days - it will be fine, we'll just go slowly." Then we went for a short test walk a few days ago, and Liz's foot was more painful and a little swollen afterward. So, all the signs point to it being a really dumb idea to get back on the trail right now. We've given in and have decided to take a real break, find a nice place to stay for a couple of weeks, and re-evaluate around Christmas.

It hasn't been all bad since the foot injury though! I glossed over it in the last post, but we had another instance of Kiwi trail magic in Mercer. We were sitting in the rest stop cafe, eating breakfast, and settling in for a 5 hour wait for our bus to Hamilton, when Brian and Cecelia sat down next to us and struck up a conversation. Turns out they were on their way to Hamilton to watch their daughter participate in a lumberjack competition, and they offered us a ride! Not only did we get a ride, we got a full on tour of the stretch between Mercer and Hamilton, including the burial spot of the last Maori queen, and a stop in Ngaruawahia to see the spot where the Waipa River joined the Waikato River. On top of that, they invited us to stay with them, north of Mercer, when we're on our way back to Auckland at the end of our trip! The unthinking, automatic generosity we keep running into here is really amazing.

We've spent the last week or so at an AirBnB with our awesome hosts, Emma and Ben. We originally (and overly optimistically) booked a single night, but have been here for eight nights now. After the first night, Emma told us to stay as long as we needed to, and even set us up on a futon when our original room was booked by another AirBnB guest. We've had a nice time reading quite a few books during the day, going out to see the latest Hunger Games, and hanging out with Emma, Ben, the other flatmates, and their friends in the evenings.

Leo, the most awesome Burmese kitty ever, in his Santa costume

We cooked them their first ever homemade spaghetti and meatball dinner to try to thank them a little bit for helping us out so much while we're stranded. It's hard to overstate how grateful we are for such a big help while we were in our holding pattern, always hoping to leave "tomorrow". Even though we'd really rather be hiking than sidelined with a foot injury, we couldn't have asked for a better, friendlier place to relax and heal up.

Cooking spaghetti & meatballs, and a simplified
version of Liz's signature blueberry-basil pie

While we were in town, we saw the Brits briefly. They left about a week ago, which made us a bit sad - it's been a lot of fun walking & camping with them. We're thinking about skipping ahead to do the 5 day canoe trip down the Whanganui River with them.

We also ran into Ben again, who brought Liz some awesome "get well" leftover pasta carbonara he had made the night before. Ben and I are both interested in trying to get a trail wiki up and running when we finish walking. Because this trail is so new, there is a lot of information about water sources, camping spots, accommodation, detours, etc that past hikers have in their heads and journals, but isn't collected anywhere for future hikers to easily reference. We're both software nerds, so we've planned to team up and try to provide a better place for a lot of the important, but unofficial, info that tends to get buried either on people's blogs or in the Facebook group for the trail.

Our doctor, Machelle, turned out to be from Bend, Oregon. Technically she's a physician's assistant, over here for a couple of years as part of a pilot program for PAs in NZ. She is also outdoorsy, and we spent quite a while talking with her about things to do in Wellington, for when we eventually get there. She also mentioned that she was having a belated Thanksgiving dinner at her house over the weekend, and invited us over! While our McDonald's apple pies were tasty, we really missed having a real Thanksgiving dinner.

The dinner was awesome. It was a group of about a dozen people - some other PAs, and some kiwi friends experiencing their first Thanksgiving dinner. Machelle and George (also a PA) had just moved into an amazing estate right on the river. We had roast chicken (turkeys are crazy expensive here - someone mentioned $130 per turkey?!), mashed potatoes, sweet potato spoonbread, cornmeal stuffing, asparagus, stuffed zucchini, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, and a slew of other tasty dishes. We felt right at home, and it was great to get to know another group of awesome people over some great food and wine. The night finished up perfectly with a fire out on the patio.

What a spread!

Machelle (on the right) in the kitchen

Dirty hiker with a plateful of food... stand back

Now, we're trying to plan the next two weeks. Finding affordable accommodations, especially close to Christmas (which is a beach holiday here...), is proving to be challenging. Hiking is cheap, and we didn't count on having to pay for several weeks of lodging on top of normal hiking expenses. We've found a couple of nice sounding AirBnB options that we're waiting to hear back from. Liz is lobbying for me to hike part of the trail without her while she heals up. It's tempting enough that I didn't flat out refuse, but I also can't really bear the idea of her sitting alone with not much to do but watch TV and read books, while I'm hiking without her on the trail that we started and will finish together.

So our plan, for now, is to hang out somewhere fun until Christmas, hopefully meet up with the Brits for the canoe trip (which doesn't require much walking!), and hope that the foot is healed up enough after that to continue on. If we just continue from the end of the canoe trip, we'll have skipped about 480 kms of the trail (about 3 weeks of walking). The hardest part of all this for us has been coming to the realization that, at this point, we will probably not complete 100% of the trail, which is a goal we've both been focused on for months. We'll likely come back up and do some of the parts we skipped after we finish in Bluff (especially the Tongariro crossing, billed as the finest day hike in the world), but will probably not have time to complete all of it. Big time bummer.

But, we're doing our best to just focus on the awesome parts of being in New Zealand for six months... of which there are so many! Sitting in a holding pattern, not really knowing what's next, seems to be magnifying our disappointment, and once we have a solid plan and place to stay for the next few weeks, I know we'll feel a lot better.