Soft Landings..

Saturday, 14 January 2012

If I'd taken a photo of where we stayed last night it would have looked like this:  but I didn't so this is a photo from the web..

We had to make a relatively early start today as we had to get all the way from a couple of hours North of Auckland, back through Auckland then 90 minutes south and around to the Coromandel Peninsula with a stop at the Woodhill mtb park on the way..  whilst it can cruise at 100k easy, our camper van is slow in the bendy roads as it's slow to accelerate so we are often letting people past (which slows us down even further).  On the fast straight roads we're fine but this is NZ so there are LOTS of amazingly bendy roads around.

 Anyways - Woodhill was awesome  - we only had 75mins to enjoy it but it was great. We had to pay $7 to ride which was cool, then there was just an incredible network of tracks all signposted really well.  It was just nice soft, shady pine forest with little downs and ups and obstacles all really well graded so you could determine whether it was going to be hard for your level of ability - it would be the perfect place to start out and develop your skills without too much pain and suffering as the ground was so soft, and I know that cos I hit it  pretty hard when I tried an obstacle rated 3 out of 5 for difficulty. Actually that's the obstacle in the photo - although you can't really see the true terror of it.  As I took the photo (before I attempted it) I was thinking to myself it would be good if it didn't become a 'before and after' photo, the after being a photo of a plaster cast or something - luckily I was by myself at that point or someone else would have had the shot of me splattered all over the ground at the bottom and  I'll save you a closeup of the massive bruise I have on my thigh now.  Anyway -after my stack I stuck to the 1 and 2s !    The camper van proved it's worth again after the ride as we both had a quick shower before we hit the road again! If you are wondering what the kids did while we rode I'm not saying anything except.. DVD player & Smurfs DVD & 2 happy campers.. yay camper van.  

As usual when we finally reached our nights destination it was after 8pm!