birthdays and ice

After our track meet last weekend, I decided to go home to spend Montana's birthday with him. First we went out to dinner at Out of the Fire Café, our new favorite splurge-y dinner place. We only go there when we're really hungry so we can appreciate the food more. Unfortunately, thanks to some lack of foresight on my part, we didn't think to make a reservation. At 7:45, the place was packed. We had the option of going somewhere else (Brady's or some place called Gu's, which didn't sound promising). We had to wait 45 minutes just for a seat at the bar. By the time we ordered, we were both completely hypoglycemic. We couldn't even talk to each other (see: hangry).

But we finally got our food (which was excellent--they do a mean plate of sweet potato fries) and resumed enjoying our weekend. Snow was glittering down outside. In a fit of festivity, I decided to order dessert. Bananas Foster. It's supposed to be on fire, right? Like a birthday candle.

It was not. Turns out that their Bananas Foster was a bowl of hot bananas and some ice cream. Wht a ripoff. Still, we ended up lingering over it for half an hour before we went back into the cold.


Sunday brought a bluebird sky.

We took a walk over to Cucumber Falls to look at the ice (and I could try out my new lens). After last week's freeze, it was incredible.

 

Then we walked back so I could do my long run (oh, hey hills!) and Montana could ride his fat bike on the snowmobile trails. We had dinner at the pub (terrible service, mediocre food, cheap).

Overall, a successful weekend.

Amazing Abel Tasman

Ok, I've given myself three solid days to recuperate and remember how to blog.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, last weekend our wonderful Arcadia guides took us on a trip to Abel Tasman National Park. Abel Tasman's an area on the tip of the South Island, near Nelson (a.k.a. NZ's sunshine capital). Maori used to live there, until some Dutch explorers came along and tried to conquer them so they could re-name the land after themselves. In the 1940's a progressive-minded lady campaigned for the area to be turned into a national park to preserve its natural beauty. She bullied the government into agreeing with her.

We'd catch a sea-shuttle out onto a point on the Abel Tasman Coast Track. Then we'd hike - ahem, tramp - a section on the first day. On Sunday, we'd do a guided kayak trip back to where we started. 

But before all that fun, we had to get an early start for our traveling day on Friday. We had to catch one of the the Interislander ferrys to get from Wellington to the South Island. 

The folks at Interislander seem to have a monopoly on the island to island transportation. But they do a darn good job. This was more like a cruise than a ferry ride. There was a full bar with fresh espresso (duh, because it's NZ), a food court, and a terrific motown band on deck 7. Check out their page. It's worth it.

Plus the scenery along the way was simply incredible.

The trip was pleasant enough. Something about being on a 3-hour ferry ride before 8:00 in the morning makes everything seem more mellow and slow. I chatted about tramping and rugby with a Kiwi guy sitting next to me. He was a scuba instructor with a passion for Arc'teryx jackets. He drank three beers before 10 and said "sweet as" at least twenty times. 

We landed (docked?) in Picton, a sunbathed little seaside town with a couple bakeries. We piled onto a tour bus and drove around the bay and through the hills to arrive in Marahau, a tiny beach town right next to the park. I'll spare you the pictures of roads and sheep.

Just kidding. I had to sneak one in. Sheep are too great.

We explored the area a bit. I went on an amazingly gorgeous run on the Abel Tasman track. Infinite jade water and white sand all around. I joined up with the rest of the group, and we hung out on a sandbar until it was time to consume massive quantities of carbs lovingly prepared by Mother Jane and Alex, our Arcadia support guy from Wellington.

We annihilated heaps and heaps of pasta and salad and dessert.This picture doesn't do it justice.

We spent a star-studded night in these adorable wooden huts and got up early the next morning to start the first leg of our hike. We caught another little boat that dropped us off further up the Coast Track.

I took at least fifteen pictures of the same water and trees. I had a hard time believing anything was real.

The ferry dumped us out on a beach and started pulling away before we could scoot off the gangplank.

The trail was easy - gently rolling, clean, and sandy. We had a leisurely hike, stopping for photos, lunch on a beach, and swingset breaks.

 

During this photo, the boys were busy looking at rocks. Typical.

Mother Jane at Cleopatra's Pool

Eventually we strolled to the sun-soaked bay where we'd spend the night in the hull of a boat.

It was cozy.

After we shoved all our stuff into our little beds, we found out that the roof of a katamaran is an excellent diving deck. 

Then the captain and crew grilled us a manly dinner. We went to bed sunburned, exhausted, and full of lamb. 

The next morning came around drizzly and gray. A great day to not get sun poisoning in a kayak. After we squished into the boats, we weren't dry for the next five hours. We paddled around the bay, stopping to look at fur seals hanging out with the seabirds.

Our guides acted like raft guides, telling lewd jokes and flexing their muscles under their lifejackets. Like all my friends at WV, they really got a kick out of telling me how small my arms are. I focused on looking bigger.

Success.

We paddled back to Marahau and realized that we had to go back to Wellington. There was another long ferry ride waiting for us.  We killed off most of the trip with card games and tried to pretend we weren't seasick. 

And now we're back in windy old Wellington, waiting out the rain until we can go on our next fantastic adventure. Unfortunately Arcadia won't be organizing anything else, so we'll have to pay for it all... and it probably won't be quite so seamless.

weekend: mountain bikes and Mt. Victoria

My camera was hibernating in my desk drawer all weekend. All these photos are poached from friends.


Nobody felt like summiting a windy mountain or camping out in the rain this weekend. So I took my friends Kate and Eliza on a bike ride.

They'd never been mountain biking before, but Eliza has a roadie sister in Maine who takes her on rides sometimes. Kate had been mountain biking in Arizona once, but they had to stop a lot to check for snakes along the trail.

The day was bright and sunny. We went to Dirt Merchants, a bike shop down the street from my flat. It's my favorite kind of shop: a tiny one-room deal crammed with bikes and old bike magazines and a couple pieces of merchandise. There's cool music piping through the speakers, and it's right across the street from two great cafés.

The shop manager's a really cool guy named James. He gave Eliza a free upgrade to a full suspension, adjusted my sideways stem, gave us trail advice (brakes in NZ are set up moto-style), made sure we'd packed plenty of snacks and water, and sent us off with a friendly Kiwi wave and a map.

We rode around in the field at the bottom of the trail head. Then we headed up the first hill. After three seconds, I heard hysterical screaming behind me. I turned around.

Kate was deep in a hole. Oh dear.

It got better after that. The trails were smooth, clean, and tight - unlike the craggy, slippery Pennsylvania and Ohio trails I usually ride. It was like riding in Colorado with greenery. Eliza and Kate's badassery started to show through in a mile or so. They cranked out the rest of the ride like champs and made it all the way to the top of the trail at the base of a windmill.

We'd been riding uphill for over an hour. Everyone was happy to be done.

I had a rough time posing for the triumphant bike picture, since Montana insists on selling the light wheels I used last summer.

And we got to enjoy one of the best views of Wellington in the universe.

Then the brake cables started popping off my bike, so we had to go back down on the road for safety reasons. There weren't any resounding complaints. It took five minutes to fly back down to the shop, where James was waiting to applaud our accomplishment and replace my brake cable.

I spent the rest of the day wandering downtown Wellington. I took a hike up to Mt. Victoria, the site where Peter Jackson filmed this scene:

It turns out those tree roots weren't quite real. 

Still, it was a nice enough hike without any freezing alpine blasts or Nazgul. 

Then one of the girls had a flatwarming party. Some people experienced beer-related culture shock.

Besides that picture, it was a lovely time.