Weekend shenannigans

Friday nights 6-7pm is my favourite hour of the week as its free champagne time! It was just me and Vicki this week but we managed to put away about 5 glasses each plus a yummy bowl of chile nachos :) After that we tottered down to the viaduct for some potato wedges to try to soak up the alcohol before our appointment at the -5 bar! This is a bar made of ice! you're basically in a freezer having your drinks but its really cool. You get supplied with a massive fur coat, furry boots and big gloves. Its really fun! There are ice sculptures, the seats are made of ice, the glasses are made of ice (I enjoyed eating my glass), its ace! We had 2 cocktails but we managed to wangle a 3rd each which was a bonus! Needless to say we were both pretty merry by that point and tottered home.

Saturday night we went out for Neils's 30th birthday. We had a massive meal of Nachos and dips (mmm) followed by chocolate cake with wine and then out for cocktails. I ate so much food I felt like I was going to pop. But the cocktail was good and came in a teapot!! It was a nice night but I didn't stay out late because my run was at 9am the next morning and was someplace over the other side of Auckland.

So that morning I set my alarm for an evil time on a Sunday morning. It took a lot of motivation to get me out of bed. I caught the bus to Newmarket on the other side of town but then had to navigate how to get to Remuera and the national reserve park (called Waiatarua - how am I supposed to remember that name?!?). As I had no idea where I was going, I decided to plump for a taxi as I'd hope that a taxi driver would know where I was talking about... How wrong I was! I hailed a taxi and got in. My taxi driver was called Vini. The conversation went something like:

Vini: Where to?
Lorna: Um... Some national reserve that has a long name and begins with W. Hang on, I've got it on my registration document... (lots of shuffling of papers coming from the back seat as I rummaged in my bag) Hmmm, the name of the park isn't on the registration documents. Bugger. All I know is its somewhere near Remuera and its a long name beginning with W.
Vini: A national reserve?? I've no idea about any national reserve or where it would be.
Lorna: Oh dear

So we drove to Remuera and then we asked a couple walking their dog. They knew the place fortunately, and gave us directions. Vini, however, didn't take much notice of the directions and went the wrong way. I asked for his a-z so I could look up the road names. Vini took the a-z off me and typed a road name in. Well, the sat nav found a road with that name, but it sure as hell wasn't in Auckland because it tried to take us on the motorway and the arrival time was 4 hours away!! Also, Vini, bless him, paid no attention to the arrows on the sat nav abd then started swearing when it started 'recalculating'! It was pretty funny.

Fortunately i managed to persuade Vini not to go on the motorway and I just read the map from there and directed us! Then, thankfully, I saw people with race numbers on so followed them :)

So then I was ready for the run, it was much better set up, less numbers and you got a chip to wear to monitor your time. They also had pace setters which I'd not seen before so I tried to stick with the 60 minuters. However, the first bit of the track was uphill and I was soon pretty knackered going at that pace and started to lag back. I was pretty disillusioned by then with it all and my motivation was going. Walked for a few small bits which annoyed me as I was doing so rubbish :-( definitely the worst 10k I've done yet. But I got round the course (just) and have no idea how slow I was, but i know it's going to be rubbish. (just had a look on the results website and did it in 1.02.51 - booooo)

But at least after the end of the race there were some people to help you stretch so that was quite fun and I got some free powerade. A very nice man helped me stretch my legs out :-)

Then came the walk back to Newmarket... Unfortunately, my trusty little map of Auckland didn't stretch far enough to the reserve I was at so I tried to reverse the way I navigated Vini... I thought I was going the right way, but unfortunately I wasn't and ended up in some suburb I'd never heard of.

So I asked a local where Newmarket was and started to walk there. Asked another lady when I'd forgotten the rest of the directions and she told me to go left, right and then left onto the main road. So I found the main road and turned left and walked for 10 minutes or so... I wasn't sure I was going in the right direction so I stopped off at a Wendy's diner and checked. Sure enough, I was going in totally the wrong direction so had to turn round and go back :( FINALLY got to Newmarket after about 1 1/2 hours later. That wasn't really what I needed after doing a 10k run beforehand.

But I treated myself to some lunch in Newmarket and then headed home, where I proceeded to crash out on my bed all afternoon!

In the evening, me and Anna decided to use up our free gold class cinema tickets and went to see a New Zealand film called 'boy'. It was ok, quite a gentle story set in 1984. It was really relaxing watching it whilst in gold class - I love it! Great big reclining seats and people around to serve you food or drinks if you want! (we didn't because its expensive so we made our own snacks of carrot & cucumber sticks & dip - it was great fun!) We got free tickets because we went to see Alice in Wonderland in gold class on cheap tuesdays a while ago but our seats didnt recline so we complained and got free tickets!