NZ - Day 1 - We've arrived in Rotorua!

Apologies first .... we've forgotten the USB cord for the camera. So pictures will follow, but possibly not until we get back!

We arrived in Rotorua a few minutes early, at 8:30 am on Monday. If you're trying to figure out the time conversion, NZ is 20 hours ahead of the U.S. West Coast. Here's how I think about - in practical terms, that means that NZ is 4 hours earlier in the day, but a day ahead. So as I write this it's 9 am here, which means it's 1 pm for most of you. But since it's my Wednesday, it's your Tuesday. See? Pretty, easy, right?

Marcello VERY generously offered to pick us up at the airport to help us transfer bike boxes to his home, where he'll store them for the duration of our trip. What a tremendous relief! It's absolutely fantastic that we've been able to get her with our own bikes, but dealing with the bikes and those big boxes for three weeks was going to be kind of a nightmare.

So Gregg reassembled bikes at Marcello & Heide's place. We had a moment of worry when my headset wouldn't work properly. Apparently a seal had cracked (oh no!!), but Gregg was able to put it together without the seal (yay!!!). It's not a permanent solution, but it'll be fine for the amount of riding we'll be doing here. Good enough!!

So we drove a few blocks to meet our Couchsurfing hosts in Rotorua. We spent a bit of time with Ben, and the house dog Flo, and then took off on our bikes to find some lunch, and more generally to find our bearings. Rotorua is a pretty small town, and both Marcello and our CS hosts live very near to both the forest and the center of town.

Once downtown we went straight to Zippy's Cafe. The food was good, the coffee was pretty good, and there were a LOT of Single Speeders there. After all the hype over this place I'll admit that I was expecting more, but I can see why it's a popular place. Among the SSers hanging out in front of the Cafe is Jacquie Phelan! I still owe her $3 for a patch she gave me at the Single Speed World Championships (SSWC) in Durango last year! She says she'll take a beer at the Pig & Whistle. Sounds good to me.

We exchanged some cash (FYI, no fee if you do this at the Bank/Post), picked up a phone, got some groceries, and then took the scenic tour back to our temporary home. There is a lot of thermal activity around Rotorua, and our scenic route back took us through several bubbling mud pools. Have you ever seen the old David Bowie movie "Labyrinth"? Remember the Bog of Eternal Stench?

And to cap off our first day in Rotorua, we spent a fantastic night with ALL of our hosts. Tracy & Ben are officially our hosts, but Ron & Jason have also been great company! And I can't forget to mention Flo & Nick - the dog & cat ... also pretty good company! We probably won't see everybody in the same room again while we're here, and we missed the opportunity to capture the moment on film. But we're really enjoying their company, and we're so glad to be able to spend this time with them rather than in a Hotel!!

And that's a wrap on Day 1!

Toby & Sarah, and Mary's Peak

We've hosted a number of couch surfers since we first started doing our own surfing in Australia. It's been a really cool experience. For the most part, they're travelers from within the US. We hosted a guy who was bicycling around the circumference of the US. A guy who was riding his scooter from Oklahoma (his Vesploration tour), and since moved to Eugene. Then there was the mountain unicyclist ... I need to get in touch with that guy. He was going to come back up this way this summer to do some riding. All very cool people, and we've done an absolutely terrible job of documenting their visits.

This last weekend we hosted Toby & Sarah, from Munich. They don't have much detail in their online profile, but we did see a tiny little "mtb" under interests. So naturally, we offered to take them on a ride. So where do you take a couple with a guy who mountain bikes, and a woman who's never ridden singletrack? Mary's Peak, of course.

It wasn't until we got to the top, and Gregg was describing the descent, that it started to occur to him that the descent he'd selected wasn't really appropriate for a beginner mountain biker. So Sarah and I went back down the up direction, and left the guys to take the steeper more challenging descent. Sarah was absolutely a champ. She did great going up and down. In fact she rode a lot of stuff that most of the beginner MTBers I know wouldn't have ridden. Good for you Sarah. You totally rock!

Some friends of ours were having a Tour de France party that night, so we dragged our exhausted guests out with us. We were watching tape (TiVo) of the stage that ended in the morning, so Toby had already the spoilers and new who the winner was. Still, they were pretty happy to celebrate Linus Gerdemann's win of Stage 7!

I'm sure they'd have loved to get back to the house and let their heads hit pillows, but they were too polite to suggets it. So instead we watched most of Dust To Glory. If you've never seen it, it's a really well done documentary of the Baja 1000 race.

We started the day shopping at the outdoor store and cruising the Saturday Market, climbed up to the top of Mary's Peak and back down again, and after cleaning up and relaxing for a bit, ended up with dinner and a party over at Erik & Christine's place. A VERY long day for our German guests. They were great company, and really cool to meet. And Sarah taught me to smile :) I hope they enjoyed their stay with us as much as we enjoyed meeting them.