Done With the Biking Adventure

We have made it to Brices Aunt's house in Motoeka, at the North end of the South Island!  This means that we are done with the bikes.  All we need to do now is ride them to Nelson to drop them off, which is not very far at all. 
We all made it here in one piece, but I can't say that our bikes really did.  In the last three days of riding I broke two more spokes, broke my front break, used up my entire patch kit on three different tubes and then blew out my back tire entirely.  I think my bike has had enough.  All the tire patching happened between Westport and Murcheson, an 110 km ride.  About half way my tire blew out and I had to walk my bike back to the nearest town.  I then hiched with my bike and all the rest of the way to Murcheson.  I was luck to find a guy in Murcheson who had a bunch of bike gear and gave me a new tire for free which saved me a some hitching because the nearest bike shop at that point was back at Westport.  The next day we rode up to Saint Arnaud to do some a backpacking trip in Nelson Lakes National Park.  This ride was 60 kms of up hill and was gnarly.  On this one I broke the two spokes but made it.  We then went on a three day hike through some beautiful alpine country.  Then came our last day of riding, 110 km ride pretty much all down hill!  I decided to just charge it with the two broken spokes.  I changed my gear around so that all of it was loaded onto the front with basically nothing on the back.  It was pretty sketchy.  About a third of the way my front break whent out but it wasn't that big of a deal.  All in all that was a sweet day of riding being in the highest gear for about half of it!  Another crazy thing about our adventure is that we have all lost 10 pounds.

Now as I said we are at Brice's Aunt's house and she just left to go on a little holiday for her birthday.  So she gave us the keys and we have our own nice house complete with a full vegitable garden.  We are kind of overwelmed at the moment.  And we are actually clean for the first time in about 3 months.  It is pretty sweet.  We have 13 days left here in New Zealand so we have to figure out what to do with that.  Going to explore the North Island some more.

See you all very soon!  There will be much rejoicing and pizza!

Almost up the Coast

So we have made it to Westport on the bikes and all is well.  Our bikes have had some casualties but not too bad.  I broke two spokes and still rode about 80 km on the wheel before getting to a bike shop.  Lucas has broken two spokes and had to get his wheel trued twice.  Brice has had the golden bike until his front tire decided to have an alien baby and needed to be replaced.  It was weird.  We have discovered that we are in fact in a lot better shape than when we started because we get places a lot faster and easier than we expect.  All in all bike touring is pretty sweet.
We have gotten like 3 days of sun in a row which is our longest stretch yet!  It couldn't have come at a better time either, we stopped for a couple days in Punakaiki which was awesome and then the strech of coast between there and Westport was epic.  And here at Westport we spent the day at the beach which was the best beach to hang out at yet and there was good surf too.  Now we are within 3 days of riding from Motoeka and Nelson which is were we drop off our bikes but we have them till the 20th so we can make up some fun stuff to do.  I am trying to go rafting still which is annoying because it requires quite a bit of backtracking to get to the river.  On top of that, if I travel south again there is still a chance that there is not a spot for me on the trip so it is a gamble! We shall see.

Bike Tour Under Way

So we have ridden our bikes from Queestown to Franz Josef with a side trip out to Gillespies Beach.  We have had 7 days of riding with 4 days of rain, with more on the forecast.  It is an awesome way to see the country but is a really gnarly workout and I never knew that sitting on a bike seat could be more painful.  With that said so far it has been pretty sweet!  Especially wearing our sweet spandex.  We are rocking the bib shorts hard!!  We have a month to ride up the whole west coast which really isn't that far so we only have to ride 50 to 80 km per day and we don't even need to ride every day.  So we can take our time and stop a lot which is really nice.  Still we have to eat a ridiculous amount of food which is actually kind of annoying because I am constantly hungry and run out of food very quickly.  The past several days I have been living off of peanut butter and nutella.  Very nutritious!  thank god we just made it to a town and a grocery store!
Right now my mission is to go river rafting and not pay which I am very close to being successful at.  But not yet, not yet.  Very soon though.

Also if you haven't yet check out Brice's Blog because his tends to be more detailed and have more pictures.  Basically his tends to be better.  There is a link on the left side of my blog.  Yes

figured out how to put some photos on