For our anniversary Sheila got me a session at Xflight. Xflight is a aerobatics flight where you sit as a passenger and the pilot takes you through a series of maneuvers.

Like most people, up to that point I had not done any aerobatics so I was a little nervous. I assumed it would be one of the most intense things I had ever done. That anxiety only got worse when the pilot handed me a parachute outside the plane and asked if I have ever used one. Then went on to explain that the two previous trips the passengers tapped out after move 3 of 5 and that they did a baby routine afterward instead of the full routine.

I was pretty determined that I wouldn’t be tapping out. As it turns out I am “tough enough” and was not only able to withstand everything but actually enjoyed it. He said after that we hit 6 positive g’s and 4 negative g’s.

My auction just closed. Selling two U2 tickets with a face value of $229.90 a piece the day before the sold out concert. How much did I make reselling my tickets? Good question.

To answer this question I think we should start back when the concert was announced… there was a fair amount of hype and both acts (Jay-Z and U2) could probably sell out a show by themselves. So my gambling instincts kicked in and I realized that there was a potential to make some cash by signed up for presales and buying 4 tickets and reselling 2 of them.

Signing up for presales costs $50. Which is no problem considering I will be making big money reselling my tickets right?

Signed up for presales on a Thursday they opened the next Monday. As soon as they open I snatch up four tickets for $229.90 a piece plus a $19.00 transaction fee. So for those of you that are not so good at math that brings my total costs up to $988.60 or $247.15 per ticket. Now at this point I am very pleased with myself and go to sleep that night with dreams of selling the two extra tickets for enough to cover the tickets Sheila and I will be using.

I wake up the next day to find out that U2 has sold the first show (Thursday night) this is really good news and is exactly what I expected. It is nice when a plan works out!

A few days latter I find out that U2 has announced a second concert on Friday. Disaster!!!

This is really bad news because:
a) Who would want to go to a Thursday night show when there is a Friday night show?
b) There are not enough people in New Zealand to sell out two shows in Auckland. So I will be lucky to sell them for face value

So I put them on trademe.co.nz (the New Zealand equivalent to eBay) and they sold for $161 for the pair or $80.50 a ticket. So I lost $166.65 per ticket and gained a hatred for U2. I kind of feel like they greased me out of $383.30 (amount for the tickets + the presale) because I would never have bought 4 tickets knowing what I know now.

Hope the concert is worth it!

One of our neighbours cats has started stalking us. Yesterday he showed up uninvited in the driveway and followed Sheila to the door. Sheila convinced me to let him in (which really wasn’t that hard because I am always up for abducting an animal) and give him some milk. After we gave him an ill-advised massive bowl of milk and a few scratches we kicked him back out because we are pretty sure we are not allowed to have animals in our apartment. We (mostly me) laughed at the thought of the cat going home and puking up milk and the owners being really confused.

Anyway after kicking the cat out we continued on with our night and made dinner and ate. The whole time the cat sat at our door literally crying to get back in. Thankfully after a few hours he went away.

Our Cat

Fast-forward to tonight… Guess who was waiting for me at our gate when I got home from work?  (our driveway and the property is surrounded by a 7-foot gate to keep criminals, door to door solicitors and stray animals away)

If you guessed a cat then you guessed right…he is impossible to keep out and hangs outside our door just waiting for the littlest crack to try to slither through.

Anyway our cat came in for another visit and we gave him some more milk and a piece of chicken. He is super friendly and follows us both around absolutely craving attention. I don’t want a cat but if I had to have one he would definitely be the cat I would want.

Still need to post a ton of pictures (like months and months behind) but am super lazy. Two videos from recent weekends though…with a Katy Perry soundtrack.

1. Sky Screamer Reverse Bungee

One of the 30 birthday presents Sheila got me for my 30th birthday last month was vertical bungee. I think Sheila thought that she might get away with not doing it with me but was definitely mistaken. It is hard to tell from the video but essentially vertical bungee is a cart with three seats and there is a bungee cord on either side of the cart and they add tension to the bungee then release the cart slingshotting you in a cart about 75 meters in the air. Sheila was not having it at first but after watching other people go she decided that it would be ok with her eyes closed.

It was pretty cool…launching up was ok but I wasn’t such a big fan of falling back towards the ground backwards on the first bounce. Despite the hesitation at the beginning Sheila did pretty well..:-)

2. Auckland Harbor Bungee

My first real bungee…I was really calm about it until like the night before when I started looking on youtube and came across a video of someone standing on the edge for what seemed like forever and hesitating then finally jumping. The video made me really uneasy and anxious.

Three of us went….Scott (one of Sheila’s co-workers), Sheila and myself. Sheila was along taking pictures and observing, maybe next time she will jump… It was pretty cool walking out along the bottom of the bridge that we drive on everyday and seeing the city from a different vantage point.

At the very beginning of the walk out we were probably like 5 meters above the water and it didn’t really feel that high. I was trying to calm myself down by telling myself that we were probably about 15 meters above the water and it was only a 40 meter jump so we were roughly 1/2 the total height. After another 5 minutes or so of walking we were at ~30 meters and it felt really high…then we took a 10 meter set of stairs into a pod and it felt even higher.

There were like 6 people that were there to jump and I was supposed to be #4. Scott was #2 and he was really calm on his jump…on the way down he was waving his arms like a bird which was pretty funny.

I ended up being #3 because the lady in front of me got out on the plank and couldn’t pull the trigger so she came back with tears on her face. Kind of added to my anxiety seeing someone not be able to do it… I was pretty sure I would be able to but I knew that it wasn’t going to be fun being out on the plank.

They strapped the bungee on me…it attaches to both ankles and there is a huge plastic piece right below your feet so it is really difficult to walk with it attached…you need to sort of penguin walk which is not surprisingly a little difficult on a plank 40m above the water. I was pretty nervous…. Scott and Sheila said from where they were standing I looked extremely nervous but in the video I am smiling and don’t really look that freaked out.

Being  on the edge of the plank was by far the worst part of it…actually  pulling the trigger and jumping was nothing. I was ok for the first part  of the fall too but at a certain point I think I got uncomfortable  because I was falling so quickly.

We  were hoping to just hit the top of the water but it didn’t work out  because it was low tide. I think they were dialing it in because Scott  was a few meters from the water and I was a few feet from the water but  pretty much all the people after me hit the water.

Will post the pictures Sheila took later.

Sheila has started to make some posts and we are starting to clean up some of our pictures (dating back to like January). So there have been some backdated posts that we have been making.

Shelia Posted a story about being woken up by a stick insect here and our trip to Goat Island/Tauranga here.

I just made a post with some pictures from Shelly Beach here.

Hopefully we will get a rainy day so I can clean up the rest of the pictures…:-)

During our weekend trip to Tauranga we visited the Kiwi360 kiwi fruit farm. I say we decided but really we were pulled in by the 40ft Kiwi fruit sitting just off the highway. Kiwi360 was ridiculously touristy but also ridiculously educational.

Kiwi360 Giant Kiwi

We started our visit by walking around the Kiwi360 store while waiting for the farm tour to start. Not wanting to leave empty handed we picked up the following sweet kiwi merchandise:

1. A kiwi fruit shotglass
2. A pair of kiwi fruit eating utensil (specially shaped to both slice and scoop kiwi fruit)
3. A bottle of kiwi fruit juice (which was horrible)

Since we are super keeners we were first in line to start the farm tour so we got to pick our spots on the kiwi fruit linked carts.

Sheila at Kiwi360

The tour was about a hour and consisted of a pre-recorded message playing over a loud speaker in each cart spewing out tons of fun kiwi fruit facts. There were a few stops…one was in the middle of the orchard and one was in a spot where they had some antique machinery for sorting kiwis. Unfortunately we were not there at a time when the kiwi processing plant was operating so we were not able to get the plant tour. Maybe some other time I guess…:-(

How do kiwi’s grow Clayton? I am glad you asked…take a look at this picture:

Kiwi Plants

As you can see… they grow like grapes connected to posts in a long line. Here are some more kiwi fun facts which you probably are not aware of:

• There are two colors of kiwi (gold and green)
• A Kiwifruit has twice the amount of vitamin C of an orange
• Twice as much vitamin E as an avocado
• Kiwifruit will keep in beautiful condition for up to 9 months
• Nearly 90% grow in this pocket of land – the Kiwifruit Capital of the world!
• They are as expensive in New Zealand as they are in the rest of the world

I know this is on the top of everyones minds because I get tons of e-mail asking what the toilets are like in New Zealand.

Questions like: “Do they flush counter clockwise?” “Are they white?” “Do they use water or something else that I don’t even know about?”

Well I am going to set the record straight…

I am sorry to disappoint you all but the toilets are pretty much the same here as in North America.

The buttons on a New Zealand Toilet

The biggest difference is that they all have two flush modes. #1 and #2 as depicted in the above picture.

They seem to flush really fast too so there isn’t really a spinning water motion like in toilets back home…it just kind of sucks all the water straight out.

I have decided to quit my job with Sapient and stay in New Zealand. Originally the plan was to hang out for a few months and then come back to Toronto but I had an job opportunity here and with Sheila here, it just made a lot of sense to stay. Still a lot of stuff to see and do here…

I am working as a business analyst for a consulting company so in a lot of ways it will be similar to what I was doing in Toronto except there shouldn’t be a lot of travel which is a nice change after 5 years of flying pretty much every week and living in a hotel.

So now that I am staying longer everyone should start making plans to come visit us…

So it was my turn to pick a day trip for us…unfortunately I don’t have a list of things that I want to do in the back of my mind so we left the house with a plan to go check out a water fall and a dam. Looking back at that impressive itinerary I am somewhat shocked that Sheila didn’t tell me to go check it out by myself…:-)

The dam is Cosseys Dam and it is in an area called Hunua which is home to almost nobody but has a ton of hiking trails (called trampling here in NZ).

Us at Cosseys Dam

For some reason we started taking pictures of each other jumping off the dam…not really sure why but there were some pretty funny ones. Apparently I jump in a similar pose as I sit on a toilet.

For all the incredible natural landscapes in New Zealand they seem to lack impressive waterfalls. I am not even looking for something to compare to Niagara Falls but just something that looks somewhat cool.

Hunua Falls

For some reason there was also a lot of jumping pictures in front of Hunua Falls…I can’t imagine the long term damage our antics in public have made on the Canadian reputation.

So after visiting the Falls and the Dam you would think we would have had a full day right? Nope! Not us…instead of cutting our losses we decided to drive towards the eastern coast without a real plan and hopefully accidentally find something cool. Driving without a plan has delivered good results for us in the past but was not so successful on this trip. After driving around and getting lost a few times we ended up at town named Miranda. We had a beer at the pub which seemed a little sketchy and local but was still kind of cool..the only thing I really remember about it was that the frequent patrons all had bear mugs with their names on them hanging behind the bar. That is something I could get behind…:-)

Trail to Miranda Bird Sanctuary

We stuck around Miranda and checked out the bird sanctuary and the hot spring pools. The hot springs in New Zealand are a nice and after a day of driving it felt nice to sit and relax in them. We got sold hard on the bird sanctuary (even though the admission was based on donation and we didn’t donate anything because we didn’t have any cash/change) and the dude told us there would be thousands of birds that would show up just before dusk. As it turns out there were thousands of birds but they were really boring and really far away. The only way you could really see them was through the dudes range finder and we kind of felt dirty and wrong for looking through his range finder without paying any donation money…we did it anyway but it still didn’t feel right.

Considering we started the day without any type of real plan we had a lot of fun and got to see some stuff that might be considered off the beaten track.

Not a lot to say about this trip…not because it wasn’t fun but because it was like three months ago now (Posting this on May 17^th even though I backdated it). So far behind on pictures and posts…I have finally convinced Sheila to start posting too so hopefully that will help us catch up.

But yeah…we had not been up the North West coast so we decided to drive up that way. Just looking at the map Shelly beach sounded cool because it was on a point in a bay and it was one of the only beaches in that area.

Not wanting to drive to a crappy beach (if there is such a thing in New Zealand), we decided to stop at Helensville and check the tourist information centre to see what was cool to do in Helensville. As it turns out there isn’t that much to do in the Helensville area…seemed pretty boring. We told the lady at the information centre that we were thinking of going to Shelly Beach and she agreed that this would be our best bet. She said it was a really nice beach…I don’t know if she had actually been there because she wasn’t really right.

On the drive between Helensville and Shelly Beach we passed a Macadamia nut farm…we joked about going in and taking the tour that they advertised. I thought it was a joke but apparently it was in fact not a joke for one of us…J

If Shelly Beach was back in Canada it would probably be overrun with people and everyone would think it was awesome but by New Zealand beach standards it was not great. It kind of seemed more like a mud flat than a beach…walking around in the water was kind of gross because the mud was so soft and the water was really muddy/murky. It got its name because of all the crushed shells…most of the beach above the muddy waterline was crushed up white shells.

Shelly Beach

There was a ton of little crabs too…Sheila wasn’t wearing her glasses and was worried the entire time about stepping on them.. Not sure if she didn’t want to kill a crab or didn’t want to hurt her foot…:-)

So after walking up and down the beach a bit and enjoying a slightly warm beer we decided to jump back into the Vitz and go somewhere else. Somewhere else ended up being the macadamia nut farm that I thought we were only joking about going to. So we pulled into the farm…got a couple macadamia nut ice creams (which was incredibly good) and went on the complementary self tour. There were a lot of fun facts about macadamia nuts…none of which I can remember. Seems like all these food related tours is a commercial for how healthy eating that particular food is….pretty sure if there was a cigarette tour here they would tell you how darts are the super food and cure cancer…:-)

As you can see in the picture below macadamia nuts grow on trees like apples and have green shells. I think they must be roasted like coffee or something to get the brown dry shell.

Nuts

Macadamia Nut Fun Fact:

As you can see below if you run out of gravel when constructing a driveway you can substitute macadamia nut shells.

Nut Driveway