Wet 'n Wild

What were you doing early last Saturday morning? I'm willing to bet my basketball (which is obviously worth more than any amount of money) that no one was doing the same thing I was...

What was I doing you ask? Well let's start simple: I was driving on a very windy but beautiful New Zealand road in MAVY. I'm assuming that eliminates almost everybody :) I was also listening to the audiobook of Eragon, trying to tune out all three of my little sisters crying, and above all concentrating very intently on breathing through my mouth so as not to smell my sister's breakfast for the second time that morning :P
  

Why was I putting myself through all this you may ask? There was a multi-stake youth activity in Hamilton! And getting together with other youth like us was worth any kind of unpleasant drive :D

We honestly had no idea what to expect when we got there except that it was called "Wet'n Wild", but it turned out being a ton of fun, and really well organized. How could it not be a blast when the first thing we saw was this massive slip'n slide?

We met up with some friends we already knew from an orchestra exchange, and were introduced to heaps of other great kids.

and yes, that is my same old frisbee... :D

By the time it was all over we were covered in grass, mud, chalk, and sunburns, but it was so worth it!

(For anyone that's wondering, the kid on my right is Cameron, he's from Australia... enough said :D)



After we'd had our fun, it was my mom's turn. So we parked MAVY in the shade at the stake center parking lot, and played basketball and watched the girls while she did a session at the temple.

     
The drive home was much better than the one there (basically everyone just slept the whole way) and we got home around 7pm. What a day! Time to have a cup of hot chocolate and curl up in bed, yes?
Yeah right! You know my family better than that! Within fifteen minutes, I was on my bike to the gym, and people were showing up at our house for a party :) I got back just in time for the fireworks around 9:30 :D

 I fell asleep wondering how even with 7hrs of driving we had still found time for so much fun :D

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...