Rugby Road Trip: Op-shop world cup

All hell was not breaking loose at the Hospice Shop in Whangarei. Photo / Matt Johnson

How better to gauge the nation's Rugby World Cup mood than put a man in a campervan and tell him to get lost?

For this entry, Matt Johnson checks in from friendly Whangarei.

It was like a crime wave.

The little lady next to me had forgotten to pay for her sleeping bag. Down by the winter sell-out of ladies trousers, the store's only other occupant seemed to be acting suspiciously. As though her ring finger had gotten caught in one of the zip-up flies.

All hell was not breaking loose at the Hospice Shop on the corner of James and Roberts street, Whangarei.

"Are you going to the game?" I asked.

The woman behind the glass cabinet, itself filled with goblets and necklaces - the unwanted heirlooms of the departed - eyed me up and down. Looked over at her Team Leader. Noelene.

Or was it Phyllis.

"Here's trouble," she said.

I felt guilty asking. Already had my ticket... and the match was a sell-out. The queue for tickets inside the council buildings sometimes 17 or 18 people long. #15 took a cell phone call and almost lost his place.

And the volunteers of the op-shops of Northland, the people of the price tag, weren't into time-wasting. There were school uniforms to be sold.

Yet this one question was everywhere in Whangarei: Are you going to the game? Like the wood of trees which goes on living in the houses and furniture it builds, the clothes here all had stories. But no one was listening. The tales they might have regaled had taken a back seat to the mysteries of stadium seating.

"Of course I'm going to the game," the volunteer said, my dressing gown ($3) and England World Cup Champions 2003 t-shirt ($1.50) already bagged.

"The ladies over at the Vincent De Paul said they're gonna watch it on TV," I told her. "With a cup of tea."

She rolled her eyes. Like the ladies from the Vincent De Paul had just knocked on five metres from the try line in a World Cup semi-final.

"Doesn't surprise me," she said.

Matt Johnson moved from Paris to a campervan under the Khyber Pass overbridge. Follow him across New Zealand on Twitter: @KeaKaharoadtrip. And thanks to Kea for entrusting a van to his care.