Curing itchy feet...

My feet have been getting itchy.  Really itchy.

Whether this is because I've barely set foot outside Dunedin in seven months - two brief weekend camping trips aside - or because the end of summer is in the air (was that it?), or because in this last crazy fortnight in NZ what's really important in life is standing proud in our minds, I'm not sure.  I know last weekend was really hard though - epic sessions going down in Taranaki with a crew of good friends out, while I drifted between so-so waves in a layer of fleece.

I got back from a trip out in the van, swept the sand and the ice-cream wrappers out, and parked it in the garage.  Next to the camping gear, and the shelf with the spares on it.  There's an oil filter sat there now, along with a four-litre can of Castrol.  I stood there and looked at my van and figured just what I'd have to do to fire it up and drive the thousand mile journey north:  oil change, valves, set the timing. Check the tyres.  Fetch the ipod and throw some baked beans in the headbanger.  Go - there's plenty of time along the way to deliver the motivational speeches that I know, deep down, keep her going.

It was hard enough not to run right on in and book the ferry then and there.

I moped around for a couple of days, wondering how I could shake myself out of it.

I surfed every day - quick blats to the beach in the car, so as not to cut up the day.  Didn't help, too much.  Now I had sore shoulders to go with the itchy feet.

Tried to write - that always makes me feel better.  Couldn't.

So I loaded up the bus - me and the dog, a surfboard, lunch, and a laptop.  I went and parked down at a nice beach, surfed some okay waves, walked the dog, and then sat down in the bus and ate.

It's a curious thing, as to why sitting in the back of the bus should be so healing.  Maybe it's the smell. (All buses smell good.  If you're an olfactory pervert who doesn't like getting their hands dirty - stay away.  You'll have to have one.)  Maybe it's some cosmic imprint left in the fabric of the thing by near-as-dammit forty years of good times going down in there.  Whatever.  But for the first time in a week the words came back, in a trickle at first, and with them some sense of - if not contentment, then a lessening of unease, for sure.

Buses is fucking great, and you knows it.