Battling the All Blacks

Our All Blacks training session was an amazing experience and it gave us a real insight into how fit those boys are.

We're both pretty fit now, but the ABs fitness coach, Nick Gill, wanted to show us just how fit professional rugby players have to be. He got us doing a number of the drills that they have to go through, only we did a lot less of them. And were still knackered!

It started with a warm up of passing, then a quick game of touch rugby to get us moving. Then we were into the running drills. We did two, while they would be expected to do about 8 and maintain the same pace. We didn't do too bad, but we're not sure we could have kept going at that pace.

Then is was onto some conditioning drills, with crawls and drags across the grass. We had to try and wrestle rugby balls off them (and them off us) for a minute (phew!). And there was some lineout and kicking practice. More running drills finished us off before we headed back to the gym for a shower before lunch.

The boys were absolute stars and friendly as anything. We even showed them the video we'd done to win the training session. They seemed to be rather amused (wonder why?!). They posed for photo after photo and did autograph after autograph. We'd even bumped in Aaron Smith on the flight up to Auckland and he'd been more than happy to chat to us. There have been a fair few twitter conversations with them since too ;)

A happy day that we will remeber for a very long time.

 

Some crazy Kiwi-ness - but it was worth it

On July 30th, we're going to train with the All Blacks. No, that's no lie. It's the truth. Annalie and some friends won a competition to train with the ABs conditioning coach and three of the team - nice!

To win this, Annalie and her friends had to put together a video stating why they wanted to win. We did a parody of the Air New Zealand safety video featuring Richard Simmons! We hope that the competition sponsors, Powerade, had a good giggle when they got it!

The competition was supposed to see the top five finalists go to a public vote, but for some reason, the other four finalists were ineligible so we won outright! And Annalie was lucky enough to be picked to bring a friend, so Ian gets to go too.



Annalie also thinks it shows off her weight loss a bit too :)

A Hobbit habit

With the world premiere of The Lord of the Rings "prequel", The Hobbit, due to take place in Wellington next week, the whole place has gone a bit Middle Earth Mad really!

Wellington is the rightful place for the premiere, as it was the birthplace of Sir Peter Jackson's dreams and made the work of Weta world famous.

Some examples of the fun things around town:

An Air New Zealand baggage carousel is dressed up as the Hobbit village of "Bag End"!

 

Gandalf presiding over the premiere venue

Gollum chasing fish at Wellington Airport.

I'm sure there's much more fun to come!

A free scenic flight

While we were in Raro, we'd seen ads for a short scenic flight around the island. It was something we fancied, but we never got round to it.

Well, Annalie got a free one as we departed. Her window seat on the left hand side afforded a fantastic view of the island after take off.

Kind of shows how small the island actually is!

All good things must come to an end

After 8 days of bliss on a South Pacific paradise island, we're awaiting our flight home.

On the drive to the airport, we once again glimpsed some whales playing in the surf. It kinda summed up the holiday really.

The only thing that makes our trip home a bit more bearable is the fact that we got upgraded to business class.

Strangely, Air NZ uses a 777 for its Sunday afternoon flight. But it gave us the opportunity to bid for an upgrade using our loyalty scheme dollars.

They use an auction approach to allocate upgrades. So we put in a bid that was below "strong", not hopeful of a win. But win we did. So now we're enjoying the delights of the (tiny) business class lounge in Raro before heading home.

It's been a fabulous 8 days. And I reckon we'll be back. Hopefully we won't wait another 6 years before our next beach holiday! But what next?