Day 6 in New Zealand: All Things Wellington

The early bird gets to take troll photos in front of Weta Workshop without a bunch of tourists in the way!

It turns out that you can never know another person completely, because how did I not know that my spouse of 20+ years was this interested in movie special effects? He had SO much fun in New Zealand checking out filming locations and props and, especially, booking us for this tour of Weta Workshop in Wellington:

I'm into the books, not the films, but I'm very into crafting, and I also thought these spots were very interesting because of all the fine details that Weta Workshop puts into them. When you zoom in on any part of the giant troll statues, for instance, you can see all kinds of picky details--bloodshot eyes, runny noses, wrinkles, scars, chapped lips, chipped teeth...

Even broken toenails!

Every element felt handcrafted with equivalent attention to detail:

Before the tour, we got a chance to bop around the gift shop, where I did some more damage to the tune of a gorgeous box set for the younger kid:

Reading aloud The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as a family are some of my sweetest memories!

You can't take a ton of photos inside the tour, but they did have a few older pieces laid out for people to photograph--

--or play with, ahem:

They had some mock setups to illustrate the types of materials the designers use and their work areas, and I thought those were the most interesting displays on the tour:

And they had a designer talk to us about the joys of sculpting with aluminum foil and cement clay, and we all got to make our own little aluminum sculptures for him to admire!

My little aluminum foil dragon head is delightful, I was assured, and he made it *almost* all the way back to Indiana with me...

Having been warned that parking is tight near Weta Workshop, we'd parked in a neighborhood several blocks away, and after the tour, the gift shop, and breakfast and flat whites in a nearby cafe, we were happily chatting and walking back to the car, when all of a sudden my partner, of all people, randomly shouted a greeting at a total stranger across the street!

The kid and I were MORTIFIED. This had never before happened to us in all our time together. Had he gone mad? Was he in an altered state of consciousness? Had their been psilocybin in the coffee? There is no way he knew anyone on the sidewalk in Wellington, New Zealand!

Except that yes, he did apparently know someone on the sidewalk, or at least, he recognized someone. That random dude was one of the two co-founders and owners of Weta Workshop, just walking casually to work, and he seemed happy as pie to return the shouted greeting of his biggest fan.

After that shock to my system, I clearly needed to spend the next several hours in my happy place: a museum!

The Te Papa museum was an excellent companion to our Maori cultural experience, because it had alllll the rest of the history and geography and culture you'd want for filling in the gaps. I loved EVERYTHING.

Check out this giant chunk of wood:

You can see choppy marks on it that are from an ancient adze.

And here are some other archaeological finds, including tools made from now-extinct animals and items imported from surrounding islands:

One of the things that I found very interesting is the fact that the museum had on display just the absolute porniest Maori art, presented completely without commentary on how porny it was:

Ahem.

Look how big the oars for the biggest boats are!

This model is a better look at the Maori dwellings than I was able to get at the Mitai Maori Village. They're purposefully half-sized with the even smaller doors so that even caregivers with small children inside can easily defend them.

All the pounamu jewelry is also really special:

We'd seen a couple of protests during our trip--and apparently just missed a large one in Wellington--so this exhibit on the (purposeful?) mistranslations of the Treaty of Waitangi that the British colonizers used was really interesting:

The British and Maori translations of the same document have actual different meanings. So, like, YEAH the Maori are mad about it!

Peeped out the window to make sure the car hadn't been snatched and ugh, it's pouring. It was sunny earlier!

Some of my other favorite artifacts include this wool and hibiscus bark cloak from around 1870--

--this shockingly on the nose translation of Moana's name (I was similarly startled at the Mitai Maori Village when our guide told us that the Maori word for the chicken we were about to eat is "heihei")--

--this super cool navigational tool--

--confirmation of the piece of random information that I always announce whenever I'm watching Moana with somebody but I could never remember where I heard it from and therefore nobody every believed me... UNTIL NOW!!!--

--and one of my perennially favorite artifacts to find, children's embroidery samplers:

Taking a moment to celebrate our own journeys to this place!

Taxidermied kiwis! None of these guys are as round as the ones we saw at the Otorohanga Kiwi Center:

I was charmed when I first learned that a weta, as in Weta Workshop, is a cave cricket. Here are a couple of those weta!

Albatrosses had been on the kid's must-see list in New Zealand, but she saw SO many of them from her ship before she even got here. She said that they looked just like these, though!

And here's my new nearly-favorite animal: the moa!

This moa egg fragment was found at a Maori burial site:

Downtown Wellington is pretty walkable, so when we were done with Te Papa we just left our car in the museum lot and went for a wander on foot. 

You might remember that the younger kid is obsessed with David Bowie, yes?

Well, Wellington apparently is, too!

One of the items on my to-do list was to visit Choice Bros. and, along with having a couple of pints for ourselves--

--I bought a can of Rebel Rebel to take back home for my kid:

This world in which we each have a complimentary checked bag is SUCH a different world from backpacking it back and forth to England a couple of years ago!

We made kind of a DIY downtown food tour for ourselves, filling up on wings and pints and ice cream--

--then slogged through the rain back to the car and made one last stop at the grocery store for a packed breakfast for the next day.

Because come tomorrow morning at 5:00, we'll be on a ferry across the Cook Strait!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

West Towards Home with Roger Williams, Baron von Steuben, and Shake Shack

How cute is this parking lot bunny? One the one hand, I felt like I should scare it so that it didn't think that it was okay to just sit there in a parking lot, but on the other hand... look at its sweet little ears!!!!!!!

Also, here's the iced coffee bar I've been telling you about! I really wanted to take a better picture, but I also felt like an asshole whipping out my phone and taking a picture in the crowded bagel shop, so this sneaky pic will have to do. You can't see the lovely creamers and add-ins, but you CAN see all the nice varieties of coffees, yum...

And here's what it looks like when you've made your own delicious iced coffee just the way you like it and you've bought yourself a couple of bagels and you're ready to drive from Falmouth to Philadelphia!

I wasn't in a hurry on this day, so I thought that I would 1) avoid the toll roads, 2) avoid New York City entirely, and 3) see how many national park sites I could fit in. I'd really wanted to visit the Thomas Edison National Historical Site, but I hadn't realized how quickly the house tour tickets would sell out, and I didn't want to see it without the house tour, dang it.

Oh, well--there's always the Roger Williams National Memorial, with free parking and free admission!

Despite being super small, this national memorial site has officially radicalized me on the topic of Roger Williams. Why is he not WAY more famous?!? He was awesome!

For the rest of the day, whenever I had to stop for gas or at another national park site, I proceeded to blow up the family group chat with yet more Roger Williams factoids. 

Did you know that although he immigrated as a Puritan, he wasn't a religious extremist like most of the other Puritans? He believed in the separation of religious and civic matters, and that religious wrongs shouldn't be punished by civic action.

He named one of his children Freeborn!

He lived in Plymouth Colony for a while and even preached there, but he got pissed at them because they'd settled on Native American land without permission and also refused to pay the Native Americans any recompense for taking their land, so he left. 

He wouldn't shut up about civil rights and fair treatment of Native Americans, though, so eventually the entire Massachusetts Bay Colony exiled him, and he escaped the sheriff by fleeing on foot during a blizzard! The Wampanoags hid him in their own settlements until Spring.

Later that year, he acquired property by properly negotiating with and compensating the native peoples who it belonged to, and he founded Providence Plantations as the first European settlement on the continent in which church and state were strictly separated, and government was by majority rule. 

It was said by all that he and the native peoples of the surrounding lands respected each other and negotiated together when they wanted different things, and he also learned a bunch of their languages. 

Eventually he managed to unify all the nearby European colonies, and then the whole area became a sanctuary state for people persecuted by the Puritans. And that's how Rhode Island has the country's oldest synagogue!

I'm sorry to say that he was a little iffy about slavery, particularly when they were Native Americans captured during wars with other peoples, but he did try really hard to legislate against importing African slaves, and against slavery for life and passing down the status of slave to one's children... he was outvoted, though.

So imagine how fun it would be to be in my family group chat and get frantic texts of Roger Williams factoids All. Damn. Day. 

Oh, and Roger Williams memes!

Anyway, the park itself was actually pretty small, although it does contain a spring that used to mark the center of Providence Plantations... and this guy's grave, I guess:

So on we go to Weir Farm National Historic Site, a place that I fully admit that I knew nothing about other than that it was roughly on my route and had a passport stamp I could collect. 

I've come to realize that it's never any use to go to a place just for a passport stamp and a quick poke around, because I will then ALWAYS be like, "Ugh, I've got to come back for a proper visit!" 

Weir Farm didn't really feel like a place you could buzz through and see all the sites and move on with your life, although they do have house and studio tours, etc. Instead, it felt like a place that you needed to bring a picnic and some art supplies and a nice, long book to in order to really appreciate it:

In this instance, the visitor center and museum was the least of the experience!

I especially want to come back with my especially artsy younger kid and watch her be inspired. I don't know how you could walk around the grounds and NOT decide to set up your canvas and acrylics and start your en plein air masterpiece right away.

And while she paints, I will lounge nearby on a quilt in the grass, nibble on brie and sourdough French bread, and read a very long and very fascinating novel.

I don't know if it was specifically because I told Google Maps to keep me off the toll roads or because I told it keep me well away from New York City, but the rest of my journey after I pulled out of the Weir Farm parking lot was BONKERS. I'm not sure if I drove on a single highway? I am VERY sure that I drove on many, many, many residential streets! It was a bleak afternoon, chilly and rainy, and I spent it on the kind of slick, windy, hilly, rural roads that would have had me as carsick as a dog if I hadn't been in the driver's seat.

OMG it was charming, though. So freaking beautiful. I kept driving down into these absolutely magical valleys with little towns in them, and every single little town was smack in the middle of some kind of little fall festival, with hay bales and pumpkins and scarecrow decorations and people walking around in flannels or puffer vests. At one point, driving into the most magical valley yet, I noticed an especially large amount of flannel- and puffer vest-clad people congregating at the median, and as I drove past I saw that everyone was visiting a giant statue of the Headless Horseman chasing Ichabod Crane!

The worst part of a solo road trip is that when you're hours behind schedule and the road and the weather are poor and you're worried about driving windy, hilly roads after dark, you have to be your own bad guy and not let yourself take an hours-long detour to find a pay parking lot in a crowded autumn tourist town and fight the crowds to pay your respects to all the finest literary spots that Sleepy Hollow has to offer. 

I'll visit properly when I come back to picnic at Weir Farm and take my tour of Thomas Edison's house!

As it was, I didn't find my hotel outside of Philadelphia until well into the night, and I fell asleep pretty much immediately after barricading the door to my room and wolfing down a peanut butter sandwich and some kettle chips.

Even though the kid's college was just a few minutes away, she was busy the next day learning until lunchtime, so I went back on my own to Valley Forge, because even though I'd been there twice already within the last few weeks, I had not yet paid homage to my own favorite hero of the American Revolution:

Baron von Steuben was a wonder, you guys. He was more or less openly gay, which they were not at all cool with back in Europe, but in the military and political world of brand-new America, everyone was seemingly cool with it, alluding to his relationships calmly and cheerfully in letters and such. I imagine this is entirely because he was an absolute beast of a war machine, and simultaneously a teacher so skilled that he could teach advanced drills and maneuvers without a shared language between him and his students. 

Although the scholarship is clear, some scholars still currently speculate about von Steuben's sexuality, but I think that's only because in our contemporary society, we still don't have a clear understanding of how the queer experience was expressed and acknowledged and understood by historical societies. There was clearly some capacity for non-heterosexual expression--remember that exhibit in the New Bedford Whaling Museum:

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But he certainly had male partners in life, and that was pretty well acknowledged and accepted by his social and career circles, as it should have been. And I just think it's low of places like Valley Forge to use some scholars' dithering as their excuse to completely erase a part of von Steuben's complete life, a part that was clearly very important to him, just to avoid having to deal with some visitors being pissed about it. Von Steuben was a hero and we would have lost the Revolutionary War without him, and if you're going to pitch a fit about him being queer then you're not as patriotic as you think you are.

Anyway, this is my mental note to bring him a Pride flag when I'm back at Valley Forge again later this year.

I love that his statue overlooks the place where he turned a bunch of guys into a functional army:

It's been naturalized back into an authentic prairie, but you can walk around and visualize what it might have looked like 248 years ago:

Tangent, but my younger kid will graduate in the year of the 250th anniversary of the Valley Forge overwintering. I wonder if the site will do any cool anniversary stuff that I'll get to come back and see?

Time will tell, but for now, it's time to go meet my kid for lunch!

My older kid thinks she's too grown now to have me look over her rough drafts, but I've gotta tell you that nothing makes me happier than when someone hands me a hard copy of their essay and asks me to give them some constructive criticism.

As you can see, I'm always happy to comply!

I don't know if it's a natural knack, the fact that they're both avid readers and have always been, or my painstaking, astute, and thorough instruction, but both of my kids are excellent writers. One prefers, and seems naturally better at, non-fiction, and the other prefers, and seems naturally better at, fiction, but I tell you what, there is nothing so able to give you a boost in life (other than money and influence, sigh) as the ability to clearly and effectively communicate, and I am thankful beyond my ability to write it that both of my kids have that ability.

This particular excellent writer and I only had time for a flying visit, as the responsibilities of a college freshman are many and varied, but after her last afternoon class we were able to spend a few hours together just catching up and gossiping. I bought her some sorely needed clothes (somehow both of my kids are underpackers), we poked around a bookstore and a record store, and then she kindly took the lead when I got overstimulated in the Shake Shack:

I don't think I can do Shake Shack. My food had too many sauces, and my mushroom patty fell apart, and I used a shocking number of napkins. 

The next morning's self-assembled hotel breakfast was MUCH better:

Even though it was too short, this was the best visit, because I got to see that my daughters? Friends, I am thrilled to report to you that they thrive. There are ups and downs, of course, stressful encounters and new situations, a Greek class and an ocean weather class that are each harder than they seem, but all in all this seems like it's turning out to be a special, perfect semester in which each kid is in exactly the best place for her to be, doing fulfilling activities and having meaningful experiences, building relationships, having adventures, and otherwise just enjoying their lives. 

It's kind of funny, because ever since I've come home from that trip I feel almost like the opposite for myself, and I'm pretty sure I'm starting my long-anticipated mid-life crisis. And I wonder if my mind was just waiting to make sure that my daughters didn't need me for any of their crises before I could start my own?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

P.P.S. I just learned that there's a graphic novel biography of Baron von Steuben entitled Washington's Gay General! I just requested it from my public library!