Beggs and Anderson in America - The Movie!

Well, it's finally out. Two months late is better than never, right?

Merry Christmas to everyone, hope you all are having a great day.

Return to Siberia

It was a few nights before Christmas and I was in the last hour of my shift getting ready to go home, when with an almighty rumble came a major earthquake. It even felt big in Wellington - the building was rolling for about two minutes - and it was obvious that it must have been big somewhere. Within seconds, as the earth came to a stop reports started coming in from Gisborne of houses down, gas leaks, fires, and people stuck in elevators. It sure made for a quick last hour of work!

I cycled back to Siberia Bend on the Rimutaka Incline track, this time going a bit further and doing 26km all up. At one stage I hit 32kph acording to the GPS, which is pretty good for me on a mountain bike. Friends are trying to talk me in to doing the ride around Lake Taupo next year - somehow I think I might need a bit more practice first!

The column you can see to the right-of-center used to hold up a bridge over the creek bed, the site of the only major accident during the 77-year operation of the Incline railroad, when a huge gust of wind blew a train off the bridge and into the gully below. It is called siberia for its inhospitable environment, and even on a nice sunny day there is an eerie chill in this gully and in the tunnel leading to it.

100th Posting Extrordinaire!

Dolphins. A file photo.

Today I went paddling waka ama with some friends in Porirua Harbor, something I've been making a bit of a habit of lately. We went out to a rocky reef at the harbor entrance. After an hour or so of paddling, with Mana Island looming in the background, we were greeted by a school of dolphins skimming the water's surface around our boats. It was so cool to see them up close and in the wild like that!

On the way back in, but still in deep water the waka capsized and I was thrown into the water. Once i realized I wasn't going to die, it was fun. We had to work together to right the boat and get back into it, which was no mean feat.

It should be noted that this is BeggsBlog's 100th posting since it all began in 2005, with more postings in 2007 than any year previously. Go the BeggsBlog! I don't know if many people still read it and I know there has been large gaps between posts sometimes, but it has been good to have somewhere to write stuff down and post photos and keep a record of stuff that I've done over the last couple of years.

The great outdoors

Well it has been a busy couple of weeks! After my last post I returned from Auckland, worked for two days and then went to Greytown for a work trip and Christmas party with the section I used to be on. We rented a couple of holiday houses for the night, did a wine tour, had dinner at a pub and went wild on Greytown.

A few days later during my days off some new-found energetic friends and I cycled across the Rimutaka Incline which is the old route the rail service used to take between the Hutt Valley and Wairarapa before they built a tunnel. Rode about 22km all up, to a gully called Siberia and back. It was well worth it and got me considering getting a mountain bike so I can do it more often.

Last night I went camping with Kevin, Gary, and Kevin's flatmates Linda and Roly (the Germans) in the Kaitoke Regional Park. I turned up after the ranger had gone home so I got away without paying my $5 camping fee! We had a big campfire going and sat around it for several hours. It was a warm, still night and perfect camping weather.

I also attended another work Christmas party, this one for my current section on Wednesday night. It was just dinner and drinks, but a very good night was had by all. It was at a restaurant and coctail bar on the 17th floor of a hotel downtown, they had a live pianist and a wicked view out the window, it was a very classy affair.

Oh and I've also been working on finally editing the video shot on the great American road trip of 2007. You can expect to see the finished product avaliable online in the not too distant future. It will be an incomplete record of the whole trip, on acount of the camera malfunctioning in high-humidity and temperature at Galveston halfway through the trip, and us not shooting any footage after that point. But the footage we do have is good and I'm doing with it what I can.

On Thursday I'm going to Auckland again for undisclosed reasons. Should be a good trip.

Ok I think thats it. Goodnight.