Silly Billies Return to Roam

L'Argentiere la Bessee (our home for the next week) After a successful race in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China it was off to France with the rest of the Seagate team (Nathan, Trevor and Sophie) to prepare for the Adventure race world champs. Having finally got a new camera, after destroying the previous one swimming in TWALK, I thought I had better post some pretty pictures and a quick update of my adventure racing mission. After arriving in Nice, we hired a car and drove to L'Argentiere la Bessee, where we are now staying for a few more days until the start of the race. Along the way we managed to find a couple of spectacular passes, exciting all of us to come back sometime to do some cycling here. With around 2000m vertical accent and smooth asphalt it is road bike paradise. Caserne de Restefond (near Col de la Bonette 2715m) Col de Vars We also managed to find some delicious baguettes and cheese, although it seems like I am the only one who is really excited

Walking along the ridge, you can see the slopes of Treble Cone Ski Area on the far ridge Finally I got some school holidays! So after a brief 12 hour run around the hills for the annual Heights of Winter Rogaine   Chris and I decided to head South for a week. We had heard that there was lots of white fluffy SNOW and that there were many big storms coming! We were very excited. We headed down south on Monday in Chris's parents little Rav. The day was crystal clear and we eyed up the foothills as we drove through the paddocks leading to Ashburton and then on through to Lake Pukaki. The night was frosty cold and clear. Inches of frost coated the ground and I wandered down to the moonlit lake shore to see the gleaming peak of Aoraki looming in the darkness, with stars twinkling above. Our cooker decided to stop working (trusty MSR of 15 solid years!) so we lit a big fire and roasted our salmon on that! As it was freezing we huddled into our 2 second pop up tent which was filled

Unfortunately this post has no pictures (other than a few I stole from the website) because a week after the race during TWALK Chris decided to take the camera for a swim......we hadn't downloaded the photos at that point... After an extremely busy term at school it was time for Easter and for most people, a nice relaxing 2 week holiday. Somehow things don't often work out like this for me, as I had decided to join a team to race in the Godzone Adventure Race - a 5 day race starting in Queenstown, New Zealand. Leading up to the race things were hectic - Chris was also racing for his team Seagate and he was busy trying to organise himself and me. We had stuff all over Chris's parents house, bike boxes and paddle gear were exploding out the door! Meanwhile I was desperately typing up thousand word essays in amoungst thinking about what food I could possibly eat for 5 days and what shoes should I wear!?! Easter Friday came and Chris had already headed down south

We've been back in New Zealand for 5 months now and I haven't managed a single post! The shame! The trouble is not lack of fun trips to write about, it's lack of time afterwards to do it! I have started studying again and seem to find zero spare seconds in my day. Nevertheless, I am determined to do some trip posts again. Since Christmas there have been several 'highlight' trips, one being a 5 day sea kayak adventure we did in Marlborough Sounds, another was a week's mountain bike orienteering carnival down in central Otago. But the one which I really want to write about on here was an amazing trip I did up Cloudy Peak with my friends Grieg and Clare. It was the same weekend as Sprint theBays Orienteering up North, which Chris had decided to do. We decided we needed to do a really good trip to make him jealous. We had a three day weekend, and I foolishly left Greig entirely in charge of the trip planning without paying the slightest attention to what he had in m