With a nice snowy & cool forecast up now (thanks Alex), there is some hope that it will start snowing properly soon & I’ll be able to kick the relative laziness of the last few weekends by getting out skiing.  Sunshine hasn’t opened yet – they have delayed it for lack of snow.  Somehow I ended up buying a pair of secondhand  XC skis & boots yesterday – so I should be able to keep my cardio fitness up over the winter with a night or two a week on the XC trails at the Nordic Center.

Thursday, being the eleventh of November was Remembrance Day here in Canada.  The annual parade is at a bit more of a reasonable hour than the ANZAC Day dawn parades back home – but having worked my final double-shift the previous night, I appreciated the sleep-in so only saw the tail end of the parade from Alex & Megan’s balcony – did hear the pipes & the Last Post, so that was cool.   The local rags were full of tributes to Canada’s fallen & serving troops – nicely, it’s all a much bigger deal over here than back home.  I don’t think I’ve ever remarked here that many provinces & states have special registration plates for veterans – that’s kind of nice.  Also, the plates in this part of the world are so much more interesting than NZ’s bland black on white plates.  It seems I don’t have too many pictures of NZ cars, but here’s one of the only car I ever owned in NZ – I definitely got my money’s worth out of that.  The second picture shows an old-school white on black (non-reflective) NZ plate on a friend’s Capri restoration.

Also on Remembrance Day, our big package of bike parts turned up from Jenson.  I’ve just now got to get around to installing a new drive train, nice new grippy (can you say grippy? – that’s for you Gareth) tires, grips (they had better be grippy too) & and a brand spanking new bottom bracket.  I’ll leave going tubeless for next year when my bike isn’t just sitting around in the garage.  I’ve been messing around very briefly with trying to share the odd document on Google Docs.  As this riding season comes to an end, here is my Riding Diary.  This goes back four years to when I started training for my first Karapoti Classic – since then I’ve just kept it going detailing every single ride I’ve been on.  Unfortunately, my bike computer died so some of the distance & time fields aren’t completed.  But you get the idea – I think I’ve done just a tad over sixty rides this summer/fall.  As you can imagine, there are a lot of good memories, friends & places visited detailed there.  Not all the functionality made the transfer from .odt to .xls to GoogleDocs format, but that’s not all that important.  My poor bike has done well over five-thousand kilometres off road now (ranging from NZ & Australia to Nepal to North America to Britain & Europe to Kenya), but at least it’s not as neglected as the singlespeed left in Rotorua – only about four hundred kilometres on that.  When I sort out what OpenOffice did to all the hyperlinks I had in my roadtrip worksheet, I’ll get around to posting that too.