Third Date: North Island Road Trip, New Zealand, 2009

Have you ever taken a vacation only to think back on it, years later, and realize you only have a scant few memories that exist outside the photos you took there? Maybe it happened too long ago. Maybe your life was in flux at the time so your head was too clouded to record and retain much, plus maybe you drank a few nights there. And maybe you’re the mom of a toddler right now so forming two complete sentences in a row feels like a Nobel-worthy achievement, let alone producing thought that extends backwards or forwards in time.

In 2009 my now-husband invited me to tag along with him and a couple friends to New Zealand, for two weeks in a rental car driving in a loop around the North Island. If I could spring for my plane ticket, he’d pay for everything else.

This was our third date.

At the time he was working in Baghdad, having already been to Iraq with the Army, returned home, started up a life in West Virginia, then accepted a job over there as a civilian. I had just come home after living in San Diego for half the year. We talked for months, mostly online; he’d been two grades older than me in high school, and we’d had some mutual friends (i.e., he wasn’t a “rando”). He flew back home for the Fourth of July, and we had a romantic first date. Later in the week he helped me move into my new apartment; he carried a heavy mattress, and I insisted on buying him a Slurpee afterward as a “reward.”

So, two weeks in New Zealand — Date 3. Totally normal. Nothing to be nervous about at all.

I find that anxiety tends to short-circuit my brain; it makes me less perceptive, narrows my peripheral vision. Squeezes my perspective to a squint.

To an anxiety-prone person like me, it makes no difference that the dude who invited me on this most epic of Date Threes was maybe the nicest guy I had ever known, who had never been anything but a calming and reassuring presence to my Nervous Nelly. It makes no difference — almost no difference — that, unlike in my previous relationship, this was a guy who wanted to be seen in public and in pictures with me (“I would be honored,” he said when I asked if it’d be OK to post trip photos of us on Facebook). Despite all of that, a person like me is still going to be too nervous to relax, to say much of substance, to focus on anything outside of: “Am I doing OK?”

We did stuff in New Zealand. So much stuff, thanks largely to a friend who’d planned their agenda long before I was aboard. We went kayaking at a place called Cathedral Cove, where during a beach break our shirtless hippie tour guide summoned us over for hot cocoa by, I swear to God, blowing on a conch shell. We rolled around in a water-filled Zorb. We saw hobbit houses, of course, and a cave full of glow-worms. I fed baby sheep. There were hot springs, a Maori cultural performance, kiwi cocktails (for me), Mount Doom from, yes, “Lord of the Rings” (actual name: Mount Ngauruhoe). In Auckland he and I put two NZ bucks in a slot machine and won four.

Outside a handful of things — such as this one kind of cookies we kept getting at convenience stores, and how stupid I felt for not packing a jacket, and OK, a few of the more amorous private moments between my now-husband and me, in the rental car and hotel rooms — the photos are my memories. So I’m glad that we’ve got them.