Aunt Jemma-Mima

Our guide for this day - Jemma - picks us up at our B&B. Lots of recent rains made our scheduled bike ride unnavigateable so we substitute a couple of two hour hikes instead.

"Will we have time for a flat white in between the hikes?" I ask the owner the night before when she called to suggest some alternatives.

"Sure," she said.
"Or maybe a bite to eat?"
"Absolutely!" she said brightly.

I suspected a stiff headwind when I asked Jemma - a thoroughly delightful young woman, by the way - about the bushes covered with bright yellow flowers that we say everywhere.

"I know nothing about the local plant life," she replied.  "I'm more of a rock person."  This was the first of many lies and mis-directions and slight exaggerations that we'd get today.

We drove for about 50 minutes into Tongariro National Park, stopping briefly along the way so that she could coordinate things with her boss.  The hike is called Silica Creek - it starts at a higher elevation, totally out in the open, windy, sunny, the ground covered in with low-growing native bush.  As we wind down the mountain, the verdant Hobbit forest rises around us as we follow a snow-melt fed river cranking along side us.

Jemma has a bum knee and doesn't set a scorching pace even though KK is right on her ass.  At one point I tell her that she certainly isn't moving too quickly for us.  She is limping noticeably at times.

We finish the hike and have a coffee.  Jemma is texting furiously and indicates that the hike took longer than it should have - both KK and I got the impression that she was laying the blame at our feet - and started throwing out a lot of conflicting and suspect estimates about our start times and end times and drive times.  She steps away to talk to her boss returning to suggest a couple of shorter hikes, indicating the second half of the hiking extravaganza would take her past a two o'clock stopping time.  This was the first either of us had heard anything about a time limit.  If there was a time limit then we would have expected an experienced guide to tell us to pick up the pace.  That's what the guide was there for.  To guide us.

Being a slightly miffable guy I began to get slightly miffed.  Kindly, I think, I suggested that it might be better to just head back to the ranch rather than try to fit in less desirable activities to fit an arbitrary time slot.  At this point it seemed that she picked up on the vibe that the customers might be getting a little miffed, and she started to get awfully chatty.

KK and I are nice people.   We didn't make her feel bad.  We didn't let it ruin the day, either.  It's a long trip and there are going to be ups and downs, victories and defeats.  This is The Program working in my life.  I don't get too up or too down.  I get miffed but the miffed-ness doesn't take me to A Dark Place anymore.