And yet another week
9 March I went to a tramping club leadership training session, which wasn't really all that informative, but it kind of inspired me to maybe consider leading a trip of my own sometime, or at least coleading. The tramping club seems to have a problem with one-semester internationals showing up and wanting to go on lots of trips and then leave after 4 months, and not enough leadership to accomodate them. I don't want to be one of those take-take-take people.
11 March
I went for my first real bike ride since arriving here, with the girl I met at the Kiwis Nest backpacker's hostel and a Kiwi mountain biker. The middle part of the bike was pretty good; went up a pretty big climb to the ridge along the peninsula, then lots of rollingness and a pretty long downhill, then turned around and followed a winding road home along the coast.
***** Note to parents: the following sentence is a figment of your imagination that you will forget immediately *****
The problem with the end of the ride was it started to drizzle a bit, and the problem with the beginning of the ride was that Gretchen's front tire went into a storm drain, Gretchen's bike flipped over said tire, and Gretchen's face went into the asphalt pretty hard. She ended up getting a ride back in a van and wasn't badly hurt. As there was nothing we could really do to help, the Kiwi guy and I went on with our ride. I called her when I got back and she was fine.
No tramping club trip this week, but 13 March (Sunday) was a river-crossing training session which was required to go on the trip the next weekend. It's weird how there are different things you need to worry about here and in the US; in America most rivers are bridged but apparently in New Zealand there are a lot of unbridged rivers you have to cross, and river-crossings are the number one cause of tramping deaths. The leader of the course (an older club member) taught proper river-crossing form, but his real emphasis was on knowing when not to cross a river. On the other hand, there are essentially no predators here so unlike in the states you can keep whatever food you want in your camp without worrying about attracting bears.
posted by Rob @ 6:09 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
So, whats the time zone there? I realized that you were far away, but are we day/night? Like, youre probably sleeping now, maybe. Oy vey.
I'm quite jealous of you, I totally think you made the best decision going to NZ.
-Todd
Well I was something like 18 hours ahead, (basically add a day and then subtract 6 hours to get to me) but then we fell back for daylight savings and you all apparently didn't do anything but probably will soon, so yet again daylight savings completely confuses me and I have no idea.
I think you actually went to the moon and you really want us to think that your excursions are with aliens and the time differences are simply a ruse to fool us into not thinking you're actually observing us from 238,857 miles away wearing some silver jump suit.
That, or NZ is in a time portal.
Regardless, is it considered fall there now?
-Todd.
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