Happy Valentine’s Day

Sorry we haven’t posted in a while, but it’s been mostly business as usual around here lately. We haven’t gone on any noteworthy trips since we are saving it all for when my mom comes in March. I know we’d been saying it for a while, but summer really did arrive a few weeks back. We’ve had almost 3 straight weeks of dry, sunny, hot weather. Surprisingly it’s been really slow on the river during this stretch - I guess everybody would rather hang out on the “beaches” near town. Can’t blame them though. The water is still pretty cold but feels great when the sun is blasting down on you. I even managed to get Steph in the lake, if very briefly. There’s a nice cliff to jump off not far from town called “Little Thailand” (no idea why) - next step is to get Steph to jump off that. There are a few other things that we’ve gotten into in the past few weeks…

Little Thailand

Full Moon Session
Every summer at least once or twice the entire river boarding crew gets together on the night of a full moon for a campout down by the river - and a moonlight run down the river at midnight. Simon and I have been pumped about this since we first heard about it, but Steph and Ali didn’t seem quite as excited and opted to hang out by the fire instead. Still, we had about 20 of us with glow sticks tied to our helmets so we could see each other in the water. We did the “Chinese Dogleg” section of the river (which we are currently taking clients on), which is mostly flat water but has a really good surfing wave called Do-little Do-nothing and a big grade 4 rapid called Chinese Dogleg. It was pretty cool surfing the wave and going down the rapids in the dark, but I’d say the most serene part was the calm sections where it was so quiet and still in the water with just the moonlight and stars lighting the way. There were some pictures taken during the trip, so I will try to track them down and post a few.

Surfing a wave "99" near campsite

Jumping into Do-little wave

Soccer Tourney
One of the drivers for Serious Fun, Ross, plays on a club soccer team here in Queenstown. As part of a fundraiser for the team, they put on a “Wakatipu World Cup” soccer tournament of 5-a-side teams competing as different countries in the World Cup format. He asked Simon and I to join him, his girlfriend Susan (also works on river), and another guide named Assaf  on a Serious Fun Riversufing team - representing the USA. Naturally I couldn’t say no. Despite being one of the most rag-tag teams in the competition, we made a really nice run all the way to the semifinals, eventually losing to team Argentina. We did beat a proper team in a shootout in the quarters - a club team from nearby Frankton with matching uniforms and taking the who thing very seriously. It was a lot of fun and good to play some goalkeeper after nearly 8 years away from any notable action.

Steph’s Boat Cruise
I guess Steph’s hotel had some money left over from their Christmas party, so a few days ago they hired a boat for a cruise around the lake. She said I wasn’t allowed to water ski behind it, so I stayed at home and took some pics of them from the deck.

Other than that we haven’t gotten up to too much lately. I did have a bit of an incident with my bike which has left me pretty scraped up, but we don’t need to get into that. Let’s just say had it gone really bad I would have made it on that Darwin Awards website. We’ve been pretty busy planning for my mom’s visit as well as our ‘around the world’ trip, which is coming up in the second half of 2010. Right now the plan is to come home for a few months this summer, then head out again on a whirlwind 4- to 5-month itinerary: ancient civilizations in Mexico, hike the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu and a river boat on the Amazon in Peru, skiing the Andes in Chile, eating lots of beef in Argentina (sorry Steph), sightseeing and hitting the beach in Brazil, more of the same across the Atlantic in Spain, visiting Paris and Normandy in France, a quick tour of London, pyramids and tombs in Egypt, biblical sites and Petra in Jordan and Israel, backpacking around Southeast Asia through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, a few days in mega-cities Tokyo and Hong Kong, the Great Wall of China from Beijing, Great Barrier Reef and the Outback in Australia before finally coming back to New Zealand. Then...who knows. Woohoo!!

Hope everyone enjoyed the snow back home!