Daily archives: March 21, 2008

20/03/08
Greetings from Blenheim, the sunniest place in New Zealand according to the hours of sunlight it gets. I’m staying with a family overnight here, and it’s just awesome to not have any snorers in my room :-). Today was a pretty relaxed day, most of which was spent hungover, yet I still managed to do a mini cycling tour of the wine areas here. I only did 32km, and only drank at one place, picking up a bottle for my host family as well. I also visited what is by far the greatest aviation heritage center (not really a museum) you’ll ever get the chance to check out. To give you an idea, the owner of most of the pieces is Peter Jackson, and the designers of a lot of the scenes was Weta studios, who did all the LOTR effects. Pretty cool eh? Read on for the full tale, but sadly, no map. All attempts to revive my GPS have met with failure. Boo!

19/03/08
The byline for this post would probably have to be “Camera Survived, GPS Didn’t” Yup, that’s right, after months of faithful service and helping me create great custom maps of all my cycling trips, my little Garmin looks like it can now officially be called dead. She fought bravely in the cold ocean waters, but in the end, it appears as though it suffered death by drowning. Too bad, it had always been waterproof in the past, but I think some of the knocks it’s taken on the road caused cracks in the housing, and the salt water rushed in and fried the thing sometime while I was frolicking with seals. Seals? Yup, I made my way to Kaikoura today, and the highlight has got to be swimming with New Zealand Fur Seals. Hunted to near extinction, but making a comeback. Of course, you’ll have to read on for the whole tale, and you can check out a partial map of the day as well. Sadly, this will be the last map you see. Good thing I’m almost done. Looks like I’ll be on the market for a new training tool now as well. Jealous Kevin? I’ve already come to grips with it, and I’m not that upset about it. It functioned great for a long time.