Today was the third day of cycling – we are making slow but steady progress towards Wellington where we’ll take the ferry to South Island, which almost everyone prefers to the North. The day started out with something very exciting – my toenail finally fell off! I am now left with a hideous nub. It better start looking normal soon. Gross, I know, but everyone who’s been near me during the past 3 months has had to listen to me talk about the gruesome details of my poor toenail that’s been dying since I ran the Twin Cities marathon on Oct 1st. Don’t worry, I won’t post any pictures, but just needed to note this major life event.

Today Jamie and I rode from Hamilton to Te Awamutu. Only 30 km – not quite up to our daily mileage goals! You see, I woke up this morning & packed the sleeping bags, mats, and tent…and immediately felt exhausted. At first I thought it might be due to the fact that the coffee we brewed in our wonderful french press stainless steel mugs (a very thoughtful Christmas gift from my brothers!) was a bust. First we used the ‘boiling water’ spigot in the campground only to discover it was lukewarm water. Ick. We were low on coffee so I dumped out the tepid water as fast as possible so we could re-use the beans with proper boiling water. To my dismay, the water I poured out was decidedly brown – precious caffeine down the drain! I boiled up some new water, drank the weak-tasting coffee and, as stated before felt exhausted.

I knew this trip would be physically very difficult for me and boy was I right. The 30 kms we covered today were, as the guidebooks call it, “Rolling Hills”. Ouch for my leg muscles. We’d speed down one descent only to labor up another hill. Repeat, repeat, repeat. For those of you in Seattle, the hills were not quite as steep as Queen Anne, but they were killer enough for me. I was panting and straining up each ascent while trying to be positive by concentrating on how big my leg muscles will be soon!

Sarah eating a snack:

At approx. 30 kms we stopped for some lunch & ice cream. As we were eating my legs started cramping and hurting. The next town was another 30 km away and rather than torture myself I told Jamie I wanted to stop for the day. He wanted to go on (bastard!) but was nice enough not to give me a hard time about being so tired.

We bought stuff for dinner at the local grocery store. The store was insanely busy – we waited in line for quite awhile before we actually got to the cashier. She then asked us for ID to buy our beer (legal age is 18 here). We gave her our US drivers licenses. She wasn’t sure of their validity so buzzed her manager to look them over. Everyone in line waited, manager came over, and said “We don’t see these too often, could we have a look at your passports?” We handed over the passports, she examined them thoroughly, put her finger on the “1980” on mine, everyone waited, … and then she asked me “So, how old are you?” I said 26, she said OK, and all was fine. The cashier then explained “We have to get ID from everyone under 25.” That didn’t make any sense at all to us, but we just left – we were happy to have our food & beer.

Jamie enjoying his hard-won beer:

Our average speed today was actually fairly high – about 17 kms/hr, with a riding time of 2 hours. Tomorrow we’ll stay in Waitomo which is the home of the world famous glowworm caves. These are huge caverns that are the homes to thousands and thousands of glowworms. They live on the ceilings, and as you float through on the small rives that run through the caves you can look up at the glowworms like stars.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 8:02 am and is filed under New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.