Mountain Biking...

"I've been biking to school for ages, and just bought a nice new bike. Casual mountain biking trip with a friend... easy, right? I'll look like this..."

 

Turns out there was a lot I still had to learn. About 10 seconds down the first trail I looked a lot like this...

 

By the end of the trip I looked like this...

Notice that I have no cool little visor thingy that most mountain biking helmets have... I snapped it in half in the same crash that wrecked the rest of my face :P

 However, I have to say this was one of the best Saturday's I've had in a while. This is a picture of the park where we were biking...

... and after one or two runs I had learned enough to get air off the jumps. Sure I still crashed a ton, but I also didn't crash on a ton of places where I could have, and that feeling of success and adrenaline is totally worth a few scrapes and a bunch of mud! When I got home mom was like, "Noah! Your legs are covered in mud!" My response was, "Ya, and blood. But it was so fun!"

Thanks, Paul for an amazing day! I can't wait to go again.

 

Spring Break in October

I have so much I want to say about our awesome spring break, but I think the best way to do it will be to caption pictures of some of our favorite moments. Enjoy!

MAVY, as we loaded up for our trip. As usual, we left about four hours after we planned, but this is to be expected I guess.

Playing frisbee at 10pm during a gas, water and toilet break. We drove until past midnight.

The next morning when we woke up we were camped in the parking lot of Jones Bay. Perfect, right? Yes, except for that no camping sign right next to it... we only barely talked our way out of a big fine when the ranger came by.

 We spent or first day at the beach. Danny tested his new wetsuit, and he and I learned to boogie-board while the rest of our family went on a hike.

My dad, brothers and I took a beautiful bike ride to that amazing waterfall. Along the way we found this awesome rope swing! It was freezing, and no one else wanted to try it, but I ended up doing it twice, it was so exhilarating! You started 20ft above the water in that big tree, and swung all the way out into the middle of the river. Best rope swing ever!

 We spent one afternoon chilling in the Waiariki Hot Pools. $2 per person, the facilities were really dumpy (those are plastic pallets holding up the sign), and the clothes we wore still reek to this day, but it still felt really good!

And we walked out to this amazing sunset!

We visited 90 Mile Beach, one massive beach that stretches as far as we could see in either direction. The waves were huge!

We spent a few hours one day "sand surfing" humongous dunes on our boogie boards. It was basically like sledding without ever getting cold.

You can't really see it, but when we got back to MAVY after the dunes there was a fine layer of sand on the whole car, and I wrote "MAVY" in big letters on the window :)

 That evening we visited Cape Ranga, the very northern tip of New Zealand. My camera was dead, so I don't have any pictures. When I get the pics of my dad's computer I'll post some, it was an amazing place.

These are all pictures from one day we spent driving around finding fun beaches. We found some amazing places!

This is my one of my favorite pictures from the day :D

We spent the last days of our trip camped in the middle of the last grove of Kauri trees in New Zealand. I've seen Redwoods, and Sequoias but these were still some of the biggest trees I'd ever seen. Truly a humbling experience.

Supposedly this area is known for having a lot of kiwi birds still in the wild, and so one night we took a red-light hike to see if we could find any. No success, but we did see a ton of really weird glow worms.

Saturday we spent all day in MAVY, driving home. Since we were missing general conference back home with our ward we listened to all three (Saturday morning, evening and the priesthood session) in the car, taking breaks in-between sessions to eat, play at a park, and pick up two massive red beanbags that we bought on the internet and had to deal with for the six hour drive left :P

Ok, here's a bunch more pictures that I couldn't really fit in anywhere else but still thought were worth posting...