New Zealand is an awesome place. The scenery is just amazing, and the country is very open to adventure sports.

I was luck enough to travel with three of my really good friends: Nathan Hoover, his wife Grace Fleming and their son Beau Hoover. Nathan kindly shared a bunch of his pictures with me, so I’d love to show them to the blogosphere.

We first arrived in Queenstown and did some various activities, including a day of trials riding. Andy Cotter let me borrow his super lightweight custom KH20 (with a titanium hub!). Here’s me hopping up a ledge, including a pre-hop that compresses the tire all the way:

I only hop “seat out” to the left, so here is a picture of the front:

One one of the beautiful days in Queenstown, Nathan, Beau, me and Scott Wilton rode up to the top of one of the local hills from the lakefront YHA hostel. Here is a shot of the scenery that Nathan took:

A day or so later I rode my KH36 up to Coronet Peak, where Grace had done some parasailing the day before. The rest of the gang drove the car up, and Nathan snapped a few pictures out the window of me grinding up the hill. This was my last real training ride for UNICON:

Fast forward a few days and we went to visit our friends John and Mandy from Escape Adventures (the guys who ran the Africa Uni tour we did the past summer). I broke my handlebar on the ride, but luckily John had a MIG setup so I could (blindly) fix it up:

An AWESOME picture of the 10km startup that Nathan took. I’m in the center in yellow/white. I got 2nd, while Scott (to my right) got first, but also crashed twice during the race! “Team USA” did awesome — Beau (fourth from the right side of the picture in white) got 3rd.

Battling Jan (from Germany) for a place during the first lap, with Beau behind me:

In the end it was the three USA guys battling it out, with Jan close behind:

The next day was trials. I didn’t have enough space for a 20″ trials uni. I was really lucky, as Tom from Australia kindly let me borrow is really nice KH20. You can barely spot me in the picture, hopping from one thing to another:

The next day was “muni”. I did the uphill and downhill, and then was fairly beat for the 8 mile “cross country” course. I ended up only doing 2 laps (4 miles or so) and saving myself for the Marathon race the next day (which was a good idea), since I’m better at long distance riding.

Nathan also got a few great pictures of me during the Marathon race. Here I am out in the lead:

That’s the short story of my NZ UNICON adventure. It was a blast, but I can’t wait to go back with my lovely wife, Louise and explore some more of the islands.

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