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!