Happy to be here.

The weekend was long and that was enough in itself to make it sweet.

The Foxton windmill.

These days, a weekend isn't as attractive for the break it provides but the company.  And the prospect of a long weekend, with someone, got me all antsy to slow down time, to make it endure, so we could see the heights and verdant valleys of the country without rush or worry.  It also meant another road trip, this time up the North Island on State Highway One to Rotorua.  

The One follows a path that snakes out of Wellington under the eaves of old wood and modern glass box houses perched on the hillside, swings on steep cliffs over the rambunctious Tasman Sea, turns inland from the western Kapiti Coast and weaves through tiny towns with more welcome signs than people and more sheep than anything else.  The towns abruptly disappear with the rise of the arid plateau, smeared like a warm palette by the brown and magenta brush that surrounds the active Mt. Ngauruhoe volcano.  This is the military training site of New Zealand but there's very little evidence of any environmental impact by the army's activity.  Beyond the volcano, the road descends toward Lake Taupo, a huge body of water resting on a winding shore of floating pumice stone.   Just north of Taupo, the steam starts to rise and the sulphuric stink of the earth's gassy belly overwhelms the smell of cut spring grass and evergreen.  Clusters of swollen, grassy bumps litter the hillsides, contusions caused by the restless fault lines intersecting and clashing beneath the region.

Rotorua is the navel of the island, a geologically hyperactive spot that makes clear the ongoing gestation of the island.  Thermal pools boil the sediment that exploded skyward in the last volcanic eruption and rained over the newly created crust that resurfaced the land.  Lakes of effervescent surface water colored by the blood red, purple and hard-boiled yellow of ferrous oxide, magnesium oxide and sulphur send noxious steam into thriving, anachronistic fern gulches.

We wandered paths beside the pools, spotting tiny fumaroles that spit hot bubbles underfoot.  We stared at mesmerizing mud pits roiling at a high boil and sending balloons of mud six feet in the air before they popped and smattered the surface.  We got used to the smell and ultimately bathed in hot sulphur pools.  Afterward, we felt silky soft and unworried about body odor.

Beside the insanity of the earth's gastric functions, Rotorua offered a carnival, black swans and their fuzzy, ugly ducklings, absolutely decent Mexican food at Sabroso and a fantastic place to stay at the Regency.  Fireworks burst after I finished my margarita and families spilled onto the sidewalk to watch.  We ate breakfast watching teenage boys practicing their haka on a street corner and we raced each other on tubular recumbent bikes hanging on a monorail.  (I was one second off the record for my age group.  Watch out Sarah Jane of Australia: I will best you yet.)  When we left, I wished there could have been a resort dance or ice cream social to celebrate the time we all got to spend together milling around the friendliest caustic place I've ever visited.  We could have compared adjectives for the smell and the relaxation it seemed to inspire.

Wai-o-tapu.

On the long road home, I thought a little about the cows I'd seen collapsing on their spindly legs to nestle into the long, green grass in the afternoon sun.  I wondered about the little lambs with their long tails that scurried away from traffic toward the belly of their mothers.  The sun had set slowly over a vast field burnished by the late light.  I remembered that coming home from a road trip used to mean traffic on an interstate moving angrily toward a place usually less beautiful than the vacation offered.

This time, we returned to our house on the ocean at high tide.  The waves were loud against the deck and the salt smell was everywhere.