We are one week into our stay with our adopted family. As we know, a beginning is a delicate time. Our stay thus far has been terrific, helped tremendously by our host’s warmly welcoming and accommodating style and very flexible and consciously designed house.

Our talents are most visible in the kitchen – we are, as a pair, good at cooking, cleaning and shopping. (Without me we are just as good, being honest.)

We need to figure out our late December to perhaps March plans and get the plane tickets for our New Zealand trip. (As you may know, we planned on leaving for NZ February 3, 2018 and, with but days to spare, found our passports would expire less than 3 months after the date of our return ticket, which meant we’d have most likely not been granted entry. This left us with a short AirBnB stay to reschedule, which we did, and applying our still outstanding Hawaiian Airlines credit to new tickets to be purchased by July 23.)

So why not camp in NZ? No reason not to frankly, and right now that’s what likely to happen. Especially how we’ve been absolutely enjoying camping (excluding the couple of mega wind nights).

The thing is that NZ has a full on period during which everything that doesn’t keep people able to vacation is on holiday. Everyone else being out means what you probably know it means without me unnecessarily writing it out. This lasts until about mid January and has been something we’ve consciously avoided during prior trips.

Our experience on GBI makes plain we’d need a better tent because of the serious wind. Not kidding: many houses have electricity generating windmills and plenty of maintenance requirement stories exist. Aside from the wind, we also found earlier in this trip that the rainfly was experiencing extensive sealant dandruff. Glad we got to see this before we needed rain protection; the fly came out to put over our mostly mesh tent when we were leaving it set up for the day. Seems we should head to REI to make use of the warranty. Other than the fly the tent is happily in good shape though. We went with the mostly mesh upper because we had condensation issues with our prior solid fabric model, the super fresh air and you can see stars (so watch out during the full moon period!).

More river path biking. I think this is 7 consecutive days, the most I’ve done in memory. Mme Awesome is also in record territory!

A turning mantra is [stay] Low, Look [at the turn’s exit rather than within the turn] and Lean [that bike]. I had this lightbulb about the Low part, basically that my hips need to get lower and that I’ve been not bending my outside leg at all enough. When I get low the bike totally can be leaned more and is plain more stable. You probably know the moral of this tsunami of wisdom: I just wasn’t strong enough to actually get that low.

Patience + Practice = Progress