On a Whim Wm's world travels

This weekend is the Extreme Sports Festival in Wellington. We walked down this afternoon for a couple of hours and watched bicycle riders launching themselves off a ramp like a ski jump and landing in the bay, breakdancing, inline skaters, and other bicycle riders doing flips and twists and other tricks in mid-air. But the most amazing thing was the FMX (which I think stands for Freestyle Motor Cross). These motorcycle riders would ride full-tilt at a ramp that would launch them a couple of stories (30 to 40 feet) in the air, where they would do all sorts of tricks before landing (in one piece) on another ramp. I have no idea how they did the things they did. They would do handstands on the motorcycle handlebars, or completely separate themselves from the motorcycle in mid-air, before miraculously getting back on before they landed. And worse. Cindy was freaking out just watching, thinking every last one of them was going to die in some horrible twisted heap of metal and flesh. I have to say I’m not sure how they did the things they did without killing themselves frequently! Next time I get a chance to upload photos, I’ll have some photos of them doing tricks in midair. What you can’t see from the photos, however, is that they were doing this stuff way (way) up in the air.

There is bad news and good news today. The bad news is that we gave up on looking for a place to live. We’ve been looking at all sorts of places, but couldn’t find any place we liked. Or worse, where the people liked us. We were trying to find a place fairly close to the University, so we were competing with lots of students for housing. The good news is that we decided to move in with our friends Jacob and Robin. The only problem is that they live in the ‘burbs — a good 20 minute drive when there is no traffic (and we’ve heard it can be an hour or more when there is traffic). Since I’m not on any particular schedule at the University, it should be fine, but it does mean that we will be buying a car. So now we need to look for a car. At least living in the burbs is cheaper, and we really like Robin and Jacob. They are musicians and dancers, too!