Have Kiwi, Will Travel

I have a friend from New Zealand visiting here. This is the friend who took me to the rugby game. Yes that’s right the unemployed bum of a student has touched down in Vancouver and received a personal anal probing by Canadian Customs. Welcome to Canada, eh!

This is her first time in Canada and she is excited to venture around the hot spots in British Colombia and have complete strangers take photos of her in random places. The student in her brought 20 pounds of books along in order to complete a few papers for school. Her last one was either on economic structure thingys or erogenous zones, I honestly think I blacked out when she started to tell me about it.

Anyway, I was able to pry her away from the books long enough to drive her up to see my friends in Penticton (roughly a 4 hour drive) for a 3 day weekend. My friend likes to know stuff so every 10 minutes she pulled the map from the glove compartment to see where we were, where we were going, what the names of the areas we passed were and how much longer she’d be stuck in a hot car with me. It was going to be a long day because I forced her to get up at 6:30 am so we could leave at 7:00am so I wouldn’t get road rage as I have a problem with being stuck in traffic.

At some point along the way as my friend handled the map she mentioned how close we were to Banff and Jasper National Parks; two places she was dying to see on this trip. I told her she could easily catch a bus in Penticton rather than having to go back down to Vancouver and up again. The idea was solid with one little exception and that was the fact she had left half her clothes and almost all her money back at my place. But she did have a credit card and a sense of adventure so I suggested a version of The Not So Amazing Race, starring her. With just the clothes on her back and her credit card in her pocket I would stand her in the middle of Penticton, blindfold her and spin her around 25 times then remove the blindfold and kick her in the butt to signal the start of the race. Personally I felt this would make a marvelous story and not just for me, but after she discovered it would take something like 15 hours on the bus to get there (usually a 4-5 hour drive by car) it made more sense to go back to Vancouver and catch a 9 hour bus instead, ending my dream of a Pulitzer and a tie in reality TV show hosted by William Shatner. Damn.