When I wake up in the hostel in the morning I feel like I'm in someones home. It's a big house, with a cosy sitting room, log fire and a kitchen full of herbs and spices. The whole house has old, dark wood floors and I feel at home. When I meet up with Shalane, she tells me that she has been floating around in a bubble for the last few days and she doesn't seem to know if she is coming or going! We both agree that in our heads, we had a goal of getting to Auckland - together - and now that we had accomplished that, we didn't really know where to go from there!
And so out come the lists! Being a Virgo, list making comes as naturally to me as breathing! I had already started 3 lists, including a list of things to ask Shalane when I see her, a list of things I need to do towards the trek and a list of things I need to buy for the trek. So we excitedly catch up on the last few weeks, leaving Broome and our recent adventures. Shalane shows me the super cool promo video that she made for the Indigo Foundation fund raising event taking place in October. Check it out - Promo Video.
We sit in Starbucks and are both just so dazed and confused that we are actually in New Zealand! We talk about the trek and get excited about the next few weeks. The preparing and the actual starting! We talk about the possibility of visiting the community in the Solomon Islands and what our plans are after the trek. Shalane decides to come to my hostel and we put the tent up in the garden to save some money. For me it was more that I needed to toughen up again after being pampered at home for a month! Moments after we put the tent up Shalane mentions that the floor seems to be feeling a little damp and before long we realise that the whole floor has become un-waterproof since Broome! As Auckland has recently had some heavy rain, the ground was really wet so we lay a few bin bags down and sleep in there for the night! We manage to stay pretty dry all night but when we awake in the morning, realise that the outer shell of the tent is also leaking a little and we both start to panic! We are now onto our 4th night and with a little hope and a lot of plastic bags we are doing ok!
Shalane calls the company that the tent is from back home in Canada and they tell her they will exchange not problem. Phew! Oh but they have non in stock until February! We then decide to walk around the main outdoor shops and ask there advice, and just as I like it, we get different information in each story, ranging from "yeah, just spray it with some of this and it will be fine", to "you could send it off to this repair place and see what they say", to "nope! it's not possible, you can't fix it". After looking at prices of lightweight, waterproof tents of the same standard and seeing price tags of $800, we start to panic slightly! It was only in Macpac, the last shop we go in that things start looking up. They guy calls the tent repair company that they use who explain they would not want to take responsibility for it as we are doing a trek on such a big scale but they do have sale on! The perfect tent for half price! Macpac to the rescue! We had a chuckle to ourselves! There we are, about to embark on the outdoor adventure of our lives and we nearly didn't have a waterproof tent - just a minor detail!So on with more fun! My birthday turned into a very well planned shopping day with a morning of price researching, a lovely lunch bought for me by Shalane and Riggers (a friend I met in Darwin last year) followed by an afternoon of buying! So with the wallet hurting and the tent bulging at the seams with purchases, all we are waiting for now is Santa to arrive. Santa of course is Paul Shadboult, our saviour! Paul, I met in India 4 years ago and with 4 years of promising to see him in New Zealand I finally make it. He has been amazingly helpful from the start, sending us info, links, letting us post all our sponsor gear to his address, answering all my questions, taking us out for dinner when we arrived. He has all our gear from the sponsors in his lock up and it really will feel like Christmas when he drops it off, we can't wait!
In the meantime we've been planning! The food drops and route marking on maps has began. It's hard to know what we will need in way of maps so as we both stumble into the final preparations blind, we hope that our laid back "she'll be 'right" Ozzie attitude will still get us through this even though we are across the water!
The next step is the gear testing practise trip!
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