EXTREME Sports
After destroying The Ring, we experienced peace and prosperity at levels previously unknown in The Shire.
Therefore, we decided to do something EXTREME. If there is one place in New Zealand that is extreme, it is Rotorua. This town has taken upon itself the enormous task of subjecting people to extreme risks and hazards without killing them. Activities such as bungee jumping, zorbing, downhill luge, and jet boating are just a few of the things that you can do.
In Rotorua, we stayed at a nice little holiday park with access to geothermal hot tubs and the hot sands of the beach. All you have to do is dig into the sand a bit and you find warm/hot water, just waiting for you to bask in it. We also visited some hot springs and refined our abilities to jump over said hot springs, which happened without incident.
Little did we know, we would soon be sucked into the EXTREME activities. We arrived at the poorly named Agrodome and first saw the Zorbing hill, which is much too small. Ben, Marvin!, and Nathan' decided to Zorb down the hill, and they were left dizzy with big smiles on their faces.
Marvin! walking away from the Zorb, dizzy and smiling
Matt, Nathan, and DC decided to search for something more extreme, so they chose to find the trails that Gary Fisher himself said had "the best singletrack ever." We rented bikes from a cool guy named Ed at Planet Bike, just at the trailhead. He was very interested in our solar car exploits, so we fed him lies about how fast, light, and strong our solar car was, they ran away with three of his best hardtails.
In New Zealand, they have a rating system for MTB (mountain bike) trails. They range from 1, which is for tots, to 6, which means death. We rode mostly 3's and 4's, which are "intermediate." We soon learned once again that New Zealand is very EXTREME, because the trails we were on were full of ridiculously steep terrain and crazy jumps. There were 100 miles of trails, and we ended up lost many times, the worst of which resulted in using the iPhone compass, which was a crazy idea, just crazy enough to work. DC managed to ride faster the more lost we got, and eventually Nathan hit a tree, did a flip, and got a grease tatoo. Nathan is fine, all he got was a bruise and a sprocket-shaped series of punctures on the back of his leg that he can show off to girls.
DC charging up a fireroad to get to the most EXTREME trails
Meanwhile, Marvin!, Nathan', and Ben found "actually quite serious" cars and raced them around a very short track. To everyone's suprise, Nathan' had the fastest lap. This is interesting for those longtime readers out there, because Ben beat Michigan in the hot lap at Hidden Valley Raceway (to be fair, Michigan uses MTB brakes and sometimes has trouble slowing down for corners).
After getting our fill of EXTREME, we decided to hit the surf. According to the Interwebs, the best surf is in a little town called Raglan on the western coast of the north Island, about 2 hours south of Auckland. We were disappointed by cloudy weather at first, but the clouds cleared, and we tested the waters with a skimboard that caused us all to faceplant into the sand.
In conclusion, Surf's Up!
