Author: neil

“Neil. Wake up. I think I’m going to puke.” Not words either of us ever hope to be uttering or hearing at 12:30am inside our tent, but here we were. And unfortunately, she wasn’t wrong. I immediately unzipped her tent door as a precaution, but before I could get my wits together to find a…

Usually a 6:30am alarm gets us into the holiday park kitchen to make breakfast before most other people are even moving, but all the fellow hikers and bikers in this campsite rewrote that story. Rett had to come back to the tent to tell me to stop packing up so that we could get our…

They’re pretty organized at the Lake Ohau Lodge. I suppose they need to be in order to serve the 30+ people here with the limited staffing available at such a remote location. Last night at dinner they told us to return to the same table for breakfast, which means we got to share our meal…

There was a group of three Japanese college students camped near us, who were “bike touring”, with barely proper equipment, yet doing huge distances nonetheless. They had come from Wanaka yesterday (68 miles over a giant hill), and it was surprising to realize that we were again close enough to Wanaka to be a day’s…

We covered the prescribed distances during our first two days riding the Alps2Ocean Great Ride, but today we packed two “days” into one. Yes, the rest day helped a bit, but mostly we cheated. It wasn’t all our fault though! On this section of the Waitaki River, there are a series of dams to generate…