Well i must say we all woke up nice and early, had breakkie and got our day packs ready. I think we managed to leave by 8.30am. We were all in good spirits, stopping to stamp the passport books. Made good time, made it to the first toilet by lunch (Thank God). Now is where it goes down hill, ha ha ha...
We got to the Hyde Memorial, and this is where we first realised that the km's on the signs were wrong. Yep by now we are getting tired, and we find out we have another 3 km's to walk on top of the 27 we knew off. This part was a real downer for us all. We did however make it to the Hyde Railway station so we knew we didnt have far to go. After 3 games of rugby the day before poor Kurt was struggling. With only a 1 km to go, Jill decided we would take a tiki tour out to the road and round the block cause we had past the Hyde Pub. After going round in a circle for 1 km we made it back to the trail, yelling abuse at Jill, and trugded on to the pub, via the rail trail we shouldnt have left. Ha ha ha haha... I can tell you, it wasnt that funny at the time, but it did make for a bit of a laugh every other day, Jill got heaps of shit over that one!!!Michelle met us at the Hyde Pub and let us soak in the bath for what seemed like hours, it was great. What i didnt expect was that when you stop walking your muscles just shut down, once you stop you just cant seem to get going again. Pure pain... We had a great night at Hyde tho.
Once again up early, a nice and chilly -2 degrees at 8.30 when we started walking again. This was quite good tho, because it numbs your muscles until they warm up again, so it made walking possible. This part of the trail was just beautiful, my favourite part of the track. We walked through a gorge, through a tunnel and over a viaduct. It was great. Once again the signage was incorrect and we got some good photos of Jill, pants down in the paddock going to the toilet. It did lift our mood quite a bit. Honestly she was the butt of all our jokes, especially when she jet propelled herself with gas along the trail, it certainly made Brett and Kurt walk ahead most of the time. We were pretty good at judging distance by now, we knew that we only had a km to walk till Waipiata, so when we came round the corner and saw the sign 3 km to go, the swear words flowed very easily from my mouth as i swore and cursed at the bloody sign. Luckily the sign was wrong, up the top of the hill we could see the pub, so down we walked, into the pub to a beautiful hot chocolate and nice cold beer. I think tonight i was in bed by 8.00pm, buggered and blistered.
The next day was the worst for me, i could hardly fit my feet in my shoes, i had a blister under my toenail and the going to start with, was quite slow. But we made it to Ranfurly, and i got some blister packs to try and help with the problem. We carried on for another couple of hours, but i had to stop, i could not go any further, i needed food, my body was shutting down. So at the crossroad half way to Webberburn we stopped for some food. Feel the difference alright, straight away i could feel my body picking up energy, refuelling... I knew i was going to be fine this last half. Lunch over we headed off again, and Jill crashed this time. Her body shut down on her, but she pulled thru it and we made it to the Webberburn shed, only to find ourselves cursing at the blood signage again. God must have heard us, cause just as this was happening Jill's phone rang and her friends drove past, u-turn, picked us up and drove us up to our accomodation, Yeah for them!!!! Once showered we got picked up and headed for the pub, by this time i couldnt get my foot into my shoe. Lucky you dont need a shoe to enjoy the beer in the pub. Yep we got nice and tiddly, had a feed, and got driven home again by the pub owner. It was a good night.
The morning was a different story, i still couldnt fit my shoe, so i was not going to be able to do the last half day walk. After seeing Jill, Brett and Kurt off, i basicly sat around and read my book till pick up time. Summing up: we all had our up's and down's, but we did it!!! and i think for the most part really enjoyed it!!!
