Time to say goodbye

We are moving out today! Hannah and I have been busy cleaning and packing our place (Serenity) last whole week. We moved into Serenity on July 2009, and after nearly 7 years, we are moving on. We will be moving to Chicago (in fact ,we have already signed our lease for the new apartment!). We are very excited about the new place, and we have planned a nice, cosy room for family and friends’ visits. However, meantime, we need to pass the final house inspection so that we can get all our housing bond back. 

We started packing about 1 week ago. It was very hard, especially for Hannah, because we only have budget for moving half the items we brought from US. This means that she has to give up lots of books, clothes, shoes and yarn. We have firstly brought A LOT of stuffs from US because we had this impression that most things in NZ are going to be very expensive. We are not wrong, but also it was a bit too dramatic (in my opinion). Eventually, after several days of negotiation and planning, we narrowed it down to 3 suitcases, 1 black plastic box and 1 wooden chest. Hannah bought the wooden chest in NZ, and it has exquisite cravings on it, and EVERYONE had told her that she NEEDS to bring that back with her to US - so the chest is coming with us! The suitcases and boxes contain books, yarns, some nice pieces of knitting from family, dive gears etc. All these items are going to be shipped and it will take approximately 12 - 16 weeks. It will give us sometime to get settle down in Chicago and find places to store all the items.

Meantime, back to the harsh reality of cleaning and more cleaning :( . Hannah did most of the cleaning - mopping the floor, cleaning the walls and shower etc. I am in charge of dusting (because Hannah is highly allergic to dust!), and driving around donating things to op-shops and throwing away bulk rubbish to transfer station. Between all the dusting and cleaning, we were holding a garage sale in order to get as much back from all our valuables… and at the end of the day, we earn $925!

Nelly (the estate manager) came with Sandie and Ken (the house owners) at around 2pm. Nelly inspected the house with Hannah, while I spend some time talking to Sandie and Ken around out future plans, how much we love the house, how we named it Serenity etc. We gave a bag of green tea to Sandie and Ken, and a bottle of Michigan maple syrup to Nelly. Ken helped us took a last photo on the deck, and Hannah snapped a last picture of Serenity as we pulled out of the driveway. Time to say goodbye - Hannah said goodbye to Serenity as her eyes starting welling-up. 

We packed our remaining of our luggages (we have left the main checked-in luggage with Selena) in the van, with Jet and Lilith, we are ready for the next part of our journey in NZ. However, we need to officially say goodbye to Waiheke as well, and there is no better way than to spend an afternoon sipping wine at Man-O-War Bay! After a nice bottle of white wine at Man-O-War bay, we had dinner at The Cove (own by Julia, the next tenant of Serenity!…such a coincidence!), and spend the night at Surfdale beach. Tomorrow, we will start our journey!

(Disclaimer: there may be grammatical and spelling errors in this post and posts in upcoming weeks because we are on the move and have limited internet access. Therefore, we need to try to do all our "internet things" on our phone 3G network. We will have to be more efficient in order not to use our limited access up before the month!...so bear with us).

Ultra-Adventure: Part 1 - Training and Traveling

Even before we ran the Wharf to Wharf, I was already planning our next adventure. For a time, I considered trying to run the Tongariro Circuit in one day, but we decided that 50 km of mountainous terrain might be a bit too much to bite off for our first ultra. So, I found an alternative - the Timber Trail - an 85 km biking and hiking trail following an old logging track. Of course, we aren't quite ready to run the full 85 km, so instead we planned to run the second part of the trail - from Piropiro Campsite to Ongarue. I found a company that would give us a ride to the start so we could leave the van at the endpoint and run to it. The run has a nice elevation profile and lots of neat remnants from the logging times.

However, before we could embark on a run of that caliber, I felt we had better get some training in. I was still in "marathon shape" and Sonny and I had just managed 25 km, but there is a pretty big difference between running for 3 hours and running for over 6!  So I plotted out the most evil run I could on Waiheke Island. It included the first part of my marathon, especially the rope-climbing hill. On a gorgeous sunny Saturday, two weeks before the planned run, I dragged Sonny out for what I hoped would be over five hours of trailing running torture.

"Reasonable fitness"

At the top of the rope climb

Manganese mines

Of course we went in

Sonny loved it

Sonny is not too sure about this whole long run thing

We made it through the long and tiring run. We returned hope, hot and sweaty to spend the next week recovering before our very first ultra! After a few days of being extremely lazy and carbo-loading (its called tapering, Sonny!) we handed the dogs off to their sitter, packed up the van, and set off on another adventure!

After a few hours of driving, we turned off the "highway" to the backroads and continued to drive for an hour. We eventually hit the visitors center for the Timber Trail, where we took photos and a large scale copy of the map. We started to get just the tiniest bit nervous that we had to run nearly 50 km the next day!

After checking out the campground located near the visitor center, we decided to head on to the campsite at Piropiro. This involved another hour drive on winding roads, and then a further 40 minutes on dirt roads like below. It was the best campsite I have stayed at in New Zealand. It was basically a giant field with a few toilets and plenty of gorgeous trees. We made a delicious dinner and settled in with a  beer after some exploring.

We ended up going to bed before 10 pm which is ridiculous, but very good when you have to run 48 km the next morning. But that story will have to wait....

Waiheke Wharf 2 Wharf 2016 Water stations

I found a couple of photos of the fabulous water stations from the Wharf 2 Wharf 2016 facebook/ webpage. I thought I would share it here. All photo credits go to Waiheke Wharf 2 Wharf.