A Girl in Every Port

We arrived in New Zealand in a beautiful place called The Bay of Islands, so-called because it is a large natural bay with…lots of islands. That was where I had lost my blow-up canoe back in my early New Zealand days. Supposedly, The Bay of Islands was scientifically found to have the second bluest sky in the world. It was the first area in New Zealand to be settled by Europeans and the location of the town of Waitangi. 

Waitangi is where the British and Maori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi on February 6, 1840, effectively giving the British control of New Zealand. We arrived on February 5, 1983, one day before Waitangi Day or New Zealand Day - a national holiday. But there was trouble in paradise. 

Many younger Maoris had been protesting their treatment at the hands of pakehas, as white people are called. They claimed terms of The Treaty were being violated and many called for a boycott of the ceremonies held on the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Numerous police in riot gear were needed for security at the ceremony that year. 

From the Bay of Islands, we sailed south to our old home city of Auckland where we saw all our relatives. I also saw the girl from two doors down from where we had lived in Mangere - Allysa Preston. She had some school event coming up and wanted me to go with her. But there was going to be dancing and at the time I didn’t believe in dancing because of the potential for sensuality that could lead one down the wrong path. 

Despite my convictions, she still wanted me to go. She probably hoped things would change when it came to the moment. They didn’t. I just sat there - the whole night. No doubt, that was a disappointing evening for her. Funny thing was, a few years later, my convictions would change and the next time I saw her, we did go dancing, albeit in a group context.

After Auckland, we called in to a few towns down the east side of the North Island where I have another one of my favorite childhood memories. Our friends, the Applegates had a relative who had a farm with horses where our youth group went out to ride. I had never ridden a horse before but it was something that very much appealed to me. The farm had very large fields surrounded by fences and gates where we could ride unsupervised. You galloped through the fields until you came to a gate where you would get down, open the gate, lead the horse through, close the gate, get back on and gallop away. I felt so free and unencumbered.

We went on to the capital of Wellington where we had lost the first ship. Wellington is on the very southern-western tip of the North Island and is the southernmost capital in the world. It is nick-named Windy Wellington because of the strong winds that blow out of the Cook Straight channel between the North and South Island. The Cook Straight is named after, guess who? – Captain Cook, who was the first European commander to sail through it in 1770. It has some of the most treacherous waters in the world.

By this time, my sister, Joy had been living in Hong Kong with a YWAM ministry called FEET (Far East Evangelism Team). They were a performing arts evangelism team. She had met a guy from Canada and now they were getting married in Hong Kong.

My parents were going to the wedding but we didn’t have enough money for my brother and I to go. Our consolation was some money to go to a movie, which was still a big deal for us. We decided to go see the movie Ghandi. Unfortunately, we were late and it was a popular movie. The only seats left were in the front row and it was a huge screen. We had to slouch down the whole time to look up at the screen and turn our heads back and forth to see the whole thing - never again.

From Wellington we sailed to the South Island where we visited multiple towns. We spent some time in Christchurch, which is a beautiful city, set in an amazing location. It is New Zealand’s third largest in population. From Christchurch, the Southern Alps are not too far, often snow-capped, that were featured in The Lord of the Rings. While their Maori name is Kā Tiritiri o te Moana, their Western name was coined by none other than…Captain Cook, with the highest peak called… Aoraki/Mount Cook.

We did a lot of Ship’s Kids performances during our New Zealand trek. One day in Christchurch I noticed this one girl giving me THE LOOK as we performed at her school. She had short hair, which is not really my preference but she was cute. We talked and ended up writing for a bit. There’s a not-so-good saying about sailors that they have a girl in every port. After the girls that waved me off leaving Los Angeles and my childhood friend I saw in Auckland, when people started hearing about this girl in Christchurch, they started saying I had a girl in every port. Of course, with me it had a more innocent spin.

Looks like a suit I may have got from the boutique?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more