This wasn’t the best travel adventure that I’ve experienced.  It is nearly 35 hours travel time total.  Everything seemed to go wrong.  Cramped middle seat for the 12 hour flight from LA to Auckland.  No bikes arriving at the final distination.  But, the suprise of the trip so far,  was the apple. 

Trudi threw some apples into a food bad for the trip.  I ate a couple on the flight and knew I had to get rid of them before entering New Zealand.  It’s an island and they are super adverse to foreign fruit and dirt.  Anyway, I thought I eaten all the apples, so after spending nearly and hour and a half in the passport control line and missing our connecting flight, we got our bags and went to the final X-ray, agriculture check.  They asked me if I had  any fruit and I said no.  But, an apple was in my backpack.  The guy was pretty nice as he was escorting me over to the place that “criminals” such as myself are taken.  Long story short, $200 on my Visa card and they let me into their friendly country.

Now it the day before the race, Sunday.  I caught some crud on the flight and am hacking up brown stuff.  Slept from 6pm to 7 am last nite and woke up feeling bad.  Assembled our bike this morning and rode for 40 miles, mainly in the rain.  Now I really feel really rotten.  It supposed to be 48 degrees and raining all day tomorrow.  Welcome to sunny New Zealand and the life of a cyclist.