Even Kirk's (Kirkaldie and Stains, the Harrods of Wellington) has decorated their shop for the Rugby World Cup. Not a bad effort, either!
So here's my new bike. It's a 2011 Giant Talon 2 - hydraulic front suspension, hydraulic disc brakes, Shimano gears, all very nice (and on special too!). I took it out on my 'regular' firebreak route - up the Kingsley St track from Stokes Valley, then south along the ridgeline to Summit Road. I normally allowed 3 1/2 hrs on my old bike (which I bought from my brother Stuart, which he bought in 1999), but either I'm getting fitter or the new bike means I can go faster, because it now takes just over 3 hrs and that's with a couple of breaks to take pictures and munch on a muesli bar. Certainly I'm noticing a big difference in the bottom gear: second-to-bottom on this bike feels like the bottom gear on the old one, which means getting up the steep bits is now mostly achievable because there's just that little bit extra range.
I rode it to work yesterday, and being such a nice afternoon (and a Friday) I decided to go home early, the long way - up the Wainui hill road (well, up the walking track next to the Wainui hill road), the along the ridge to Summit Road and home from there, which took just under 1 1/2 hours. It's normally 20 minutes if I go the most direct way, on the road.
The photo above was taken last Saturday - a perfect day for biking, nice and warm, hardly any wind.
Then on the Sunday the weather packed up, so I went and joined a whole bunch of people all wearing jeans and black shirts...
... to watch the All Blacks play Canada in their final pool match of the Rugby World Cup. I was offered a free ticket by someone at work; IRL had been given 4 tickets by a local law firm, and the powers-that-be decided to give them to people who had been involved with IRL's 'education outreach' programmes (school visits, tutoring etc.). I've been helping out occasionally with the tutoring group on Thursday afternoons for the last couple of years. So that was a very pleasant surprise!
This is only the second rugby game I'd ever really been to (the other being a Super-12 game of the Hurricanes vs the Waratahs, which we lost; I also tagged along with Dad one time in Palmie when he was doing the computer scoring, for Manawatu vs. Tonga, but I didn't really watch the game).
So the game was all right (although I did feel sorry for Canada), the crowds were pretty well-behaved (given it was a Sunday afternoon, it meant people were still pretty civilised on the train going home), and apart from struggling to make small talk with the lawyers it was a pretty good day!
