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.

 

Things Wellingtonians never say

Only when you've been here will you truly understand the irony of this clip - but it's spot on! There's nothing more really to say - other than watch it!

We're taking on the All Blacks tomorrow

Well, three of them anyway!

The boys we'll be tackling include Steven Luatua and Charlie Piatau, both of whom can be seen in this video

The third is Aaron Smith, who's a hairdresser by trade would you believe!


Photos will obviously follow!

Shake, rattle and roll

Well it's been a shaky few days in the capital. But we wanted to let you know that the three of us are OK
Things kicked off on Friday morning with a 5.7 magnitude quake just after 9am. It was enough to make Annalie "Drop, Cover and Hold" as her 9th floor office swayed with the movement. Ian was blissfully unaware as he slept through the whole thing!
As did Maddy. Who said animals had heightened senses to these things?
Thankfully there was no damage, but it was the start of a series of shocks that continued through the weekend.
On Sunday morning, just after 7am, we were woken be another long, juddering quake. It wasn't enough to have us sprinting for the dinner table, but it was significant att 5.7. Our house normally doesn't feel much, but that one sure did.
This sparked several aftershocks that we could feel, both at home and as we ventured into Wellington for some brunch. But we thought they were subsiding throughout the day.
We had planned a night out as it was Ian's first night off work from his new job. So Annalie had organised dinner at Big Dogs on Blair, before heading to the movies to see The World's End.
We'd only been sat down for 10 minutes when the biggest quake we've felt hit the town. At 6.5 it was roughly the same size as the second major quake that crippled Christchurch over two years ago. And it rattled.
Because we were out, we asked our friends to check on Maddy, slightly concerned that she might be freaking out on her own. They duly checked on her and let her calm down, before returning her to her crate with some tasty snacks. Their commitment was that they would go back and get her if there were any more quakes.
We felt a few minor aftershocks but continued about our evening, not wanting to let the quakes ruin things.
Not long after the film started, at just after 7pm, we heard and felt the next big aftershock, at which point Annalie got a text to say our friends were off to get Maddy. This was always going to be an interesting exercise as they have two cats! As you can see from this photo, we think that Maddy was probably more scared of them than they were of her! But apparently she wasn't interested in them and was just happy to me around people (usual story for her really!).

There were a couple more shakes during the evening, but nothing major, however the 6.5 quakes appears to have sparked in excess of 100 aftershocks, of varying magnitudes, throughout the course of the night. We had shoes beside the bed just in case, but we never felt a thing. Friends and colleagues weren't so fortunate it seems.
Here's where all the action has been centred.

Here's a video overview of the seismic activity of the last three or four days. But this doesn't include all the 100+ aftershocks that have occured since the 6.5 "big one".


As we've said, we're all OK and just hoping that we're coming to the end of the trail.

Aftermath of last week's storm

Just in case you were wondering what more of our Southern Coast looked like after last week's storm, here's a video that was taken, mainly on Friday.

It starts off in Owhiro Bay, literally at the bottom of our hill. It travels around to Island Bay (you can make out the island in the background before he stops to look at the sea). The video ends up by the airport in Lyall Bay.
We have since been round the coast road and you wouldn't even know this had happened. Nice work Wellington Council - and all the volunteers who helped out.

All Blacks haka

Our trip to New Plymouth to watch the All Blacks meant we were in for a treat to see the haka live for the first time. And here it is:

We found the sun again!

So after this week's Wellington weather bomb, we had already planned a trip to New Plymouth to watch our first All Blacks game. Annalie had won tickets so it was a good excuse to break out the Bach for the first time in a few weeks.

We woke to a continuation of the storm that didn't bode well for a journey north in a high sided vehicle. Wind and rain persisted. But we thought stuff it! We'd planned this weekend for ages. And besides, the can needed a run.

Most of the way up was damp, rainy and grey. It want until we reached the boundaries of Taranaki that the sun started to peek through and we started to get a glimpse of blue sky. It afforded us some lovely views of the snow covered Mt Egmont/Taranaki along the way.

By the time we got to our campsite in Fitzroy Beach, the skies were well and truly clear and the wind was merely a whisper. It made a walk along the black sand beach very enjoyable. A much different prospect to what we were expecting to face here.

We're glad we made the trip.