Monday, February 11: Hot & sunny, barely a cloud
Nadia’s
Fragmented sleep again but this time I was up just after 8:00 and had my breakfast just as the Korean women were finishing theirs and starting to pack their stuff up. Finished off yesterday’s diary entry and skyped Ranya who wanted to take me to Botany to collect the PLB and then to Sylvia Park mall for a selection of shops where I might be able to get the remaining equipment together.
We were fairly soon @ Hunting & Fishing in Botany, but the friendly staff had no idea of my order, so Rayna and I went in search of some wifi for me to access my email account and try to contact the bloke who was hiring me the stuff. At some point Rayna realised she could use the data on her phone for this purpose and after reaching my provider, Ionos, and a couple of attempts at the password, I finally got into my account, identified the guy, sent him a mail to contact H&F and we were back in the shop. They had their act together after a little while and we had all documents filled out and signed, cash changed hands, a flap cap with a chin strap was bought for $20, and we were on out way to Sylvia Park for the remainder.
Time for a quick lunch before buying anything, which Rayna deemed the PitaPit for; two caesar chicken pitas with a salad selection (mine: Tomato, carrots & beetroot), one small, one medium for $25 which I shouted. Then the shopping.
First outdoor shop had a reasonably smooth light plastic bowl for $6 to replace the one broken in Sweden, and a knife & spork for $2 a piece; the search for a multi USB power plug went unrequited, however.
Finally a pharmacy for the Cancer Society sun block and some bandaids. With that out of the way we took off to St Heliers just to see the sights and happened upon an anonymous ice cream parlour on the corner of Tamaki Drive and St Heliers Bay Rd which had positively the best hokey-pokey I’ve had for quite some time (disguised as “vanilla honeycomb”, brand was Milse). Nice-sized serving for $5, and of course one for Rayna as well (double chocolate).
Back here Nadia made an appearance then I thought I might look at yesterday’s track to see how we had done. Disaster! For whatever reason the Data Downloader was not recognising any of the USB ports and so was unable to connect. The only thing that I could think of that was different was the wire connector, although that would make no sense at all. I am pretty sure that I had used this computer on track before (E11 in Brandeburg and E9 along the Baltic Sea – or not?). I downloaded the latest version of the Prolific serial-USB software and tried installing it in different versions to no avail. A glimmer of hope was that installing legacy hardware in the Device Manager did install a com port, but only partially and little could be done to advance the system from there. It was now getting tough to try to make a decision.
Wrote to Tom about this evening but he was quite tired and apparently concerned with other things so I let it go. Time was running out.
The decision with the GPS tracker was based on its ability to record about 123 hours of track (and there was no way of adjusting the sampling rate which would have extended this enough for the whole trip). Will do the first two tracks and see how much time I have left after the Whanganui River Journey. Rayna has a computer that might install the programs & transfer the data, so I could return here for a data transfer (and a date with Tom); and I could ask in Ohakune whether someone would risk installing the programs on their computer there. In a week’s time I will have to decide how and when to do Trains Track/Matemateaonga, since the operators in Stratford had a reasonable price on offer to get me to the start of the track and wanted to know as soon as possible when they could take me there.
Have to try to get everything organised for tomorrow. showered, started packing, found the last bloodied paper tissue before it could ruin the next washing load, washed a pair of shoes, had a couple of chorizo sandwiches for dinner and made up a pair of sandwiches for the bus tomorrow.
