Approaching haloween

It is indeed a scary time of year. I have made some moves to become a more settled memeber of New Zealand society. I am now the proud renter of a room of my very own. This has meant that I've been sleeping on my Thermarest for the last few nights, but hopefully that bed situation will be fixed shortly. I also have been enjoying mountain biking so much that I was forced to bite the bullet and purchase a mountain bike.

Its a Specialized Crave Expert. Good value, lots of fun, and perfect for 4 months of use before it gets sold.

And since it has a Shadow Plus rear deraileur, it is fully equipt with the party switch. (Note: this is a term my friend Billy Lewis first used right after the release of this device several years ago. I can't take credit for it's greatness, I just always rememeber to turn it on when it's time to party)

This is a better picture of my mountain bike when I rode it up a trail to the top of a hill. This type of thing can now be an every day occurance.

Case and point: the next day I went on a different mountain bike ride. This time with at least one dude in a tank top. Jay is apparetnly at the cutting edge of mountain bike fashon. This will be cool soon.

And as a man of high fashon likes to shout it from the mountain top. Better yet, from on top of a picnic table.

But when riding in the city, this trail is just down the street from my house. It's important to remember that trail matinence is always important. Thats why they keep this vacum handy at the bottom.

 

Some kind of blog post

As of today, October 19th, I've been in New Zealand for one month. This seems a bit strange, but at this point I'm just going with the flow. Some of which I have documented in photographs.

Last week, one of my coworkers decided to fry a bunch of NZ fish for me and the other new American coworker to try. I managed to get zero pictures of the fish and only one picture of my coffee mug at the bus stop in the driving rain. The fish was very good. Totally worth waiting for the bus in the rain.

That weekend we went tramping. This was very similar to hiking. I was also informed that Kiwis (the birds, not the people or fruit) are very dumb, however are pretty good at staying away from people. Of the three Kiwis I was with (the people, not the bird or fruit) only one of them had seen a Kiwi (the bird, not the people or fruit) in the wild.

A great part of living in a land without lawsuits is that you can have a bridge that says "4 people max" and it's okay.

Down by the river.

We were headed more in that direction.

I was also informed about an hour into this tramping adventure that there would be a river crossing. This quickly explained why I was the only person not wearing shorts.

Owen's phone, which we used briefly for GPS was not working too well. If you pried the back off and removed the battery, you could get it to turn off.

Lunch! Including a peanut butter chocolate bar that was quite delicious.

More lunchtime pics from the top of Mt. Matthews. Which is supposed to be the highest peak in the Wellington area. I think it's 981 meters or something.

A bit further down, but still a really cool area. You can see Wellington on the bay in the background.

After the tramping, actually a couple of days later, we had a pretty great windstorm. I'm told this was above average even for this very Windy City. I almost got knocked over walking home a few times. Some of which looked like the video above. I took it about 100 meters from my house.

Today looked a lot like this. It was the first sunny day in a while so we took advantage. This actually started as Wayne and I riding around and then we ran into Kirk and Mike (please note all of us work in the same place) so we rode some singletrack and looked at stuff. I should also point out that this is about 40 minutes via trails from my new house I'm moving into next week and likely will be on my after work ride.

We even ran into an Emu farm.

And hopefully soon I'll be better at mountain biking.

 

More pictures of NZ

I'm continuing to settle in in my new home in the Southern Hemisphere. And while I haven't ventured much outside of Wellington, I have been enjoying riding around town when I'm not working.

This is just one example of a trail I can ride on my way home from work. IN THE CITY! No need to drive, or even make a special trip, just ride some trail after work. It's been wonderful.

This does lead to some mud on the bike, also on me sometimes, but totally worth the extra cleaning.

When I stopped by the shop on Saturday to go for a ride there were a ton of cyclists having coffee at the cafe pre/post ride. It's very cool to see the cycling community out in force. Hopefully some of them are in need of bike fixing.

Then once again out into the woods. This is Wayne, who is in town for the season from Denver. iRide is now up to three American employees. We are taking over the country, one bike shop at a time.

This is a picture of a leaf. Or maybe several leaves. The plant life here is very cool and differs depending on where you are. At the mountain bike park in town there is a distinctly jungle look about the place. So far I've seen zero panthers though, which I suppose is a good thing for my continued survival.

Today's ride involved some trail but also a lot of gravel road and some pavement. Oh, and a really really strong headwind all the way back to Wellington. I am writing this in a semi haze from just not having any energy left. Good ride and some great views of the water.