Jim helped to set us up with the DZ nearby, Ballistic Blondes Skydiving, and we went there to see what price a tandem could be for Astrid, and for me to just make a fun jump. She got a fairly good price, and after my briefing and testing out equipment, Astrid, her tandem instructor, I, a and another jumper with their coach loaded up the small Cessna 206. After a lot of time (compared to my home drop zone), we were up at 11000 feet. It didn’t feel that long, as we had lots of new views to look at!

The jump itself was really nice. Mainly focused on the views, did some turns and pulled pretty high at 5000 feet to get more time flying. I flew a 190 Safire, which was really fast on the turns, but didn’t pitch at all like I’m used to. Did a perfect landning two meters from assigned point, though, so that was awesome.

Astrid was delirious after her tandem. She told me she was pretty cool about it until I jumped off, where she kind started thinking “what the hell am I doing”. She even got to steer the canopy a bit!

Back at Jim’s place, Trem went by. Trem got a small war museum in his house, so we followed him up to take a look. It was astounding!

At five o’clock, Jim and Karin left, as they would go to the US for some wingsuit competition. It was a bit empty after they left, as the time we had spent with them was great! Really lovely people!

With the house empty, we could do what want! Said and done, we made awesome pancakes, added some white wine and watched awesome movies!

We had planned to leave the day after, but as we went up late and were pretty slow in the morning, we decided to just stay another day, plan better, and talk things through. We also used the day to do some shopping, as we needed a few cables, a SIM-card, a rear light, a bell and some bits and pieces. I also slept through most of the movies we watched, apparently I was pretty tired.

At the 21st, we managed to start biking again. Even though I am pretty sure my bike computer is tens, maybe a few hundreds, of kilometres off, it passed 9000 km this day!

That’s worth a selfie!

When we were going to make lunch, we discovered that we probably forgot my fire steel back at the camping in Waitangi. The lighter we had bought earlier were nowhere to be found, but luckily, we had a food store maybe a hundred meters away, where I bought two lighters and two bananas.

During lunch, there were tons of ducks who seemed really curious about us, or just wanted our food.

This day went fairly easy, and we decided to make a push for it. There was a park in Wellsford located a little bit outside the small town, with a public toilet and all. That seemed perfect for tonight, but would mean we would’ve to do about 90 kilometres in total before arriving there. The winds were gentle, and the road fairly flat, so we did it without a problem! The shopping for food went pretty fun, as both of us were overly tired, and the manager in the store was really nice.

On the outside, we were preparing to bike the last kilometer, when a woman came up to us and told us we could camp at her lawn if we wanted to. That would be awesome, as there would be no problem with police, locked toilets or anything else.

This turned into an awesome night, where we got to sleep inside, used the kitchen, took a shower and had tons of talk about stuff. Instead of getting to bed at nine, I managed o be up until past midnight. She even offered her box of nail polish (and there were tons of them), so I could have something better than my three week old one. Now I got space blue-ish to look at while I’m biking!