Beached in Haast

Have to wonder what the longest, grammatically correct consecutive string of capital letters in English is? (“A DIY RV…” comes to mind.)

I toured New Zealand for two weeks with my grandfather and extended family back in November 2022. We traversed the islands by bus from top to bottom, and while following the South Island’s West Coast toward Queenstown, our coach driver, Bevan, stopped at a beach and nature reserve near Haast. In the parking lot, next to us was parked a six-wheel truck on which a makeshift RV had been put together, painted sky blue, and sheltered by some delightfully rusting corrugated metal.

We had a half an hour, so I walked around by myself because I was a bit annoyed to be in the relatively sparsely populated, cold, gray, rainy, signal-less Kiwi coast when the United States men’s national soccer team was playing Wales in its World Cup opener. The grass, the trees, the sand, and water all came in shades of pastel, inhospitable, solitary, and attractive. Waves crashed on beige sand, washing up and reclaiming broken trees.

The whole thing was serene, and when I came back to the parking lot, I had new energy to appreciate the good-looking camper. I’d photographed it for a couple of minutes and was walking around its side when I realized that there were people inside the camper, and I didn’t want to bother them any more than I might already have done. Nevertheless, with its color scheme, tidiness, and spot of coziness in ugly weather, the scene stuck with me, and I wanted to capture the whimsy the camper exuded in an otherwise bleak setting.