Third day in Nampa

Notes written on 3.1.12

Funny day today - woke about 8 and things didn’t get going much before 10.30.  By that time most of the others had gone for a run/walk, and then when Liz got back she realised they had to go to see the Pastor about a kind of pre-marriage talk.   So she and Dom rushed off together in the hired car.   Chris at some point went off to see his physio - he fell off a ladder a while ago and hurt his shoulder - and Celia, Ben, Cindy and I headed into Nampa to go to the thrift stores (op shops in NZ).   

I'm a bit confused as to where we’ve been today, as it’s been a ‘shopping’ day to a certain extent: we went to Cashco at some point, and that must have been in Nampa because Dan was there working (he's the fiancée's younger brother).   It’s massive, and of course, it sells stuff in bulk, so everything seems bigger and bigger.   Then we had lunch, and I’m not sure now if that was in Nampa or Boise - think the latter.   This was at a place rather like Great Taste in Dunedin, but with a much wider range of Chinese food, and little or no European food.   It was buffet, with an eat as much as you want approach.   The food was good, but of course with those sorts of places you need to watch that you don’t each as much as you want, or you make yourself sick.   Anyway, afterwards we went over to the bank across the park to try and get some cash out.  I’d tried to use my HSBC debit card in Cashco but it wouldn’t go.  The bank was very friendly, but couldn’t take the driver’s license as identification because it doesn’t fit into their system, and they weren’t sure where else we could try - though the manager did offer a couple of other suggestions.  I was concerned that maybe my pin number wasn’t the usual one.  Anyway, we could have gone to another bank tomorrow with our passports, as the bank manager suggested, but instead we decided to try the ATM in the same bank…and both of us got money out on our credit cards without problem.   Ridiculous: machines trust us more than people. 

After the bank episode, Chris and Cindy both managed to lock themselves out of the car - Chris then tried the old clothes hanger thru the window thing, and that wasn’t working and then this burly young family came along and said he’d 'done this hundreds of times,' (which could have been ominous!) and after trying the clothes hanger without success and then something else and then something else he finally managed to get the car open.  Great rejoicing.  Dom and Liz, meanwhile, had been running around getting the marriage licence, something that had required them to go back and forward and hither and yon. 

Anyway, while the women went to some shop for something to do with the wedding, the men went into Barnes and Noble.  This was an experience in the sense that it shows that books are definitely not on their way out yet.  Huge, of course, like everything else (including the two thrift shops), and packed with interesting stuff….none of which I bought.  Finally after we’d gone into some other time-wasting shop for no particular reason, the blokes escaped to Cabela's, a real man’s shop with guns and fishing equipment and real fish in an aquarium (trout and catfish) and stuffed animals in a big scenic thing in the middle of the shop and hunting gear and clothes and shoes and everything else.  This was more interesting certainly than the previous place, but I was getting bushed, and finally, after the women arrived I went and sat in one of the cars and nodded off. Celia went back in the shop and said later it would have been her choice for a place to really look around in. 

Lastly, Ben drove Cindy, Celia and me home in the hired car.  He was okay, except he found the fact that the stop signs weren’t highlighted on the road itself with markings rather disconcerting, and at one point he nearly went sailing through one, with all three of us shouting Stop!!   It's nervewracking driving on the right because your brain insists the traffic is coming towards you on the same side of the road, and when you turn at an intersection you seem to be heading towards the wrong side of things.  The stop signs are everywhere - they're aren't any Give Way signs (although there's the occasional 'Yield') and there's this funny rule about turning right when you're on the extreme right of two or three lanes even though the lights are red and the right turn arrow is also red!