Skip to main content

The ferry trip

A funny day. I have my three boys here for the holidays at the moment who are all under 11, and today we decided to get the ferry from Devonport to Auckland City to have lunch with my Partner, Ali. We drove to Devonport and I duly parked the car in the car park, tried to buy a ticket (the machine wasn't working), ran to get on the boat and off we went on the 11.15am ferry towards the Sky Tower and Downtown Auckland. A couple of hours later, well fed and watered, we arrived back at the ferry terminal in Auckland and waited for 20 minutes for the ferry back over the water (it's only a 15 minute trip). The ferry arrived, but this time it was a different type of boat and much busier. We hopped on, checking with the ferry man that the ferry was the right one and going to Devonport (as I had reservations), and off we went..

As we neared the Devonport ferry terminal, Sam, my eldest pipes up .. 'hey Dad, this doesn't look familiar at all. This isn't where we left the car'.. he was right.. it wasn't. My head did the usual 360 degree spin for 30 seconds as I tried to figure out what I had done, as I have been to the Devonport terminal a few times before so it wasn't as if I didn't know the place. Regardless of that, I walked over the the counter and asked whether we were in the right place ... 'Yes, this is Devonport Sir', 'Are you sure you caught the 11.15am from to Auckland this morning? and not the 11.25 from Bayswater or another from Northcote?'... Another 360 degree head spin - and then it dawned on me that we must have hopped on the 11.25am ferry from Bayswater (a 15 to 20 minute drive from Devonport). I rang a cab to get us back to where we started, and a 20 minute cab drive later, we were back at the car.

The experience left me with a couple of things - firstly, when I parked the car, I honestly did not register that we were not at Devonport, despite all the signs everywhere saying "Bayswater Marina" - on autopilot I just knew we had to get the ferry and that we were running out of time as the ferry was there ready to leave. I was SO focused on getting on the ferry and the fact that the ticket machine didn't work, that I missed everything else around me - this is part personal trait, but it does demonstrate that it is very easy to miss stuff if you barrel along without relaxing to view your surroundings!

Secondly, it was funny - what was to be a reasonably simple treat turned into something that the boys will remember for a long time, not just for the ferry ride, but also for the fact that we 'lost' the car. So often, we remember the things that happen to us that are out of the ordinary or surprising, rather than those that are run of the mill. Everything happens for a reason - in this case we had a blast, laughed a lot together and will no doubt laugh about it again.

You've got to laugh, particularly when my last note on this Blog was about the pace of life! Note to self, Peter - SLOW down..

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christmas & Looking Forwards

Happy Christmas to those who have arrived here to read this post. The world and the media remind us often that Christmas is a time for giving, for compassion, for family, for celebrating Jesus and for receiving. It is also a time when we reflect on the past year - what has occurred and happened in our lives and where we have come. The New Year beckons and we begin to look forward to the positive changes that we desire, our aspirations and hopes for the future. We want to feel better in ourselves, and have an improved world with less stress, anxiety and suffering. Looking forwards is a powerful thing. It provides us with the ability to consider what may be, as we journey into the unknown. It enables us to work out where we would like things to go. In the animal kingdom, I expect we are one of very very few species that have this ability to look out over long periods of time. Other animals will look forwards I expect season by season, if that. They concentrate on the present. ...
5 comments
Read more

The pace of life

As we begin the Christmas season around this beautiful world, a period of reflection often occurs. Christmas (for most of the western world) is a time when we think about the year gone by, and about how far we have come along the road, and then we turn to the new year and begin to think about how far we are going to go and what we are going to do with our time next year. We all live life at different paces, sometimes we move quickly, at other times more slowly. We each choose how fast we want to move, making decisions that alter our progress and that sometimes take us in different directions. Sometimes those decisions help us gather momentum, at other times we lose it. That got me to thinking about physics...I was never really any good at school physics, I think the highest exam mark I ever got was around 40% despite the attempts of some very good teachers!, and the lowest was somewhere in the teens ....now a few years on from school, the querky reality is how much physics i...
2 comments
Read more

Pathways

The other day I found a piece of paper that I'd created with my best friend a few years ago, and it reminded me of how simple things are when we want them to be. We travel along our path, experiencing this and that - hearing and seeing this and that, and along that pathway we make decisions. Those decisions keep us moving, either in the same direction or in another. Like travelling along a road, we sometimes know our way, we recognise the road - it's a well travelled road as they say - we know where we are going because we have been there before. At other times we see signposts and respond to what they are telling us - we react to them and alter our direction based on what they say. At other times, we register signposts to give us confidence that we are on the right track, we experience 'deja vu' or coincidences we just get that intuitive feeling that we are moving in exactly the right direction. I think this simple little topic is going into my book. Have a gre...
1 comment
Read more