rounding out the top 10...

6. though dad had to endure the brunt of the downside of these, i love long car rides. more, i love long stretches of nothingness. so many hours were spent sitting a car or plane, staring, thinking, not thinking, reading, listening, writing. its my little busy bodies only way to rest sometimes and i felt so glad to just have so many long stretches of this nothing. what makes these so perfect are that the scenery as you stared felt out of a dream and made your thoughts different, roaming, expansive, but also familiar, close.


7. heaven was rolling into queenstown on day 13, after a million stops in smaller towns to see the sites and have some site-specific adventures (town of 500 for glacier hiking in the pouring rain, anyone?). situated by a lake and surrounded on all sides by dramatic dark mountains, the nighttime view of queenstown was beautiful- serene and exciting all at once. but the moment became better when we woke up the next morning to find that we were actually living in a postcard. The colors and views and perfection of this townhouse in this town were almost too much. The lake was sprawling, rivaled only by the horizon filled with green, lush mountains and more mountains beyond them, set right next to the snowcapped peaks as seen in the LOTR trilogy (yes, literally, it was those mountains). everyday, we couldnt get enough of this scenery and marvelled each morning as if it were the first time seen.


8. there a things you think you always want to do and when you finally do them, realize how much they were both not what you expected and more than what you expected. balloon rides at sunrise are one of them.

not what i expected: the frigid morning air to be so refreshing; the stupid things that i said to the attractive assistant due to extreme fatigue ("it was so cold, it was like negative zero!", "do you need training to professionally drive a jet boat at high speeds?"); the deeply affecting fear that seized me as our balloon effortlessly and silently ascended into the air to 6,000 feet, giving us views that cannot be recounted, but terrorizing my overactive mind that kept imagining the fall we could easily take should we chose; the descent to landing's silence, that it was perfectly placed and barely missed power lines and a major roadway

more than i expected: seeing everything you could want to see in perfect clarity, in brilliant light, in a thousand colors and tones and hues, for miles and miles and miles, it seems to be expected, but its so much more.

9. in my attempt at health and working off the large amount of (suprisingly quality) food we consumed, i joined my siblings and dad for a run around the lake one morning. we began at the same pace and that maintained for about 6 minutes before i began to get winded and slow down. my dad and i stayed together while my (surprisingly tall) brother and sister raced ahead. soon enough, though, my dad outpaced me. so there i was, my younger siblings and dad (with a knee injury) were out of site and my chest burned and ached from the run. between gasps and walking breaks, i experienced moments of awe and disbelief at my surroundings, again too beauitful for words. The music was perfect in my ears again, jose gonzales this time. as soon as i reached the towns edge and my family passed me up again after having gone farther into town, i stopped trying and just walked a long walk home. i practiced the presence of my god and tried to talk to Him like this would be my 'quiet time', but it felt wrong.

you are with me all the time, i said to him, and i feel wrong trying to make it seem like now is the only time.

i am with you all the time, you see, He said, and i already know your thoughts. ok?

ok.

so we were with each other, in all this perfection, both listening and seeing all the same things. deep back into nothing, then lingering and skipping around, my thoughts just rested in this presence. in there, i was deeply content.



10. the last night of our trip was a night on the town. my sister, brother and i went to a bunch of bars and clubs and as they slowly drank the night away, i was bored, glad to be sober, annoyed at the drunken culture, increasingly worried about them at best making a mess of themselves or at worse, getting into varying levels of trouble. though stable in my choice not to drink, i felt the like the bland, deadweight sidekick and i never thought things would look up until we made it to the last bar, which had karaoke and hundreds of people our age. the night turned around completely after we made friends with a group of canadians, then a couple australian girls, one brit boy from bath and a dreadlocked spanish/british dancer from scotland and we felt part of this transient family of friends. the high point hit when the karaoke singers had the whole bar belting out "wonderwall" and the high point sustained for about 2 hours as the whole bard turned into a giant dance floor, with us somehow in the middle. from my sober standpoint, i avoided the embarassing confusion of drunken dancing and socializing, but i did dance and dance and dance and made friend and laughed and sang till my voice cracked. when all was said and done, 4am rolled around and i felt alive.