Kepler (Part 1)

Whew. Well, I finally turned in my essay after sitting at the computer lab from 10:30am til 4:00pm. Plus, last night I was at the library from 9-11pm. I've never done so much work before! That or it's never seemed like work...or something. But anyway. (sorry, that was wed. it's now Friday night...it sometimes takes forever to write these babies!)So. The Kepler! Awesome! We spend a few weeks planning it but everything boiled down to...Sunday and Monday before tramp: meetings to sort out gear, food, transport and who was going which direction around the loop. We were short a car so I offered to drive, since Emily's car wasn't going to be used while we were tramping. Plan was to meet at 6am after picking up everyone. I was to pick up four people.Tuesday: after a long, hard day of [intermittent] study and packing, I left to fill the car with petrol and pick up some polyprop from Anna's. (do we have polyprop in the States? I can't remember. It's pretty much a must when tramping here). When I returned to my flat, Courtney had returned with two guys from Germany that she’d been hitchhiking with. We all had fun, talked a lot, and I finally got into bed at 12:30 am after Patrick (one of the guys I’d be picking up the next day) called to let me know that I needed to leave even earlier to get him. Yuk. Wednesday: Woke up FREEZING cold at 2:30 am, drank some hot water and was up at 5 am. Left 15 min later to gather and meet the troops. We distributed the food that had been prearranged, prepackaged and divided for our two groups – clockwise and counterclockwise around the track loop. We were on the road by 6:30am! Stopped in Gore (small town right before Clinton, no joke! They call it the “Presidential Highway”) for toilet break and took a group picture for fun; Patrick took over driving for the duration of the drive. In the car I mentioned that I wanted to start using a new word, “swift,” to mean cool, neat, awesome. Mark mentioned the word “conquistador” and how it had made the “top 30 least used words” list. We decided to incorporate both words into our daily vocab with indefinite definitions. At about 11:30am or so we arrived at the DOC in Te Anau for our hut passes. It is at this time that I broke the news to the B group going "backwards" around the loop that I've defected and was now joining the A group. I have a rather funny picture of my friend Damon while he's in the process of accusing me of being a traitor. But because I switched groups, my friend Joanne also switched which made the groups even, 6 people in each. Funny enough, we were equally divided in gender as a whole, with four girls/two guys in my group and four guys/two girls in the other.