Project VELAIA

The weather is wet and rainy outside. I am sitting in the warm, cozy house and plan the next 2.5 months in New Zealand. I will stay for 1.5 months on the South Island, first going south, then coming up to the center again and finishing to the north.

Later on I’m setting over to Wellington on the North Island and cycle the remaining 1 month over there to finish around 14th of May in Auckland to catch my plane to San Francisco.

Phenomenal CouchSurfer Danny, one of my hosts here, has printed out the South Island and stitched it together. He marked the most interesting places and I’m sure that his experience in outdoors in the Kiwi country will guarantee me a great time.

Additionally I’ve bought 2 maps, 1:500 000 for the South Island and the book “Classic New Zealand Mountainbike Rides, 6th edition” – it is a strange feeling as I’ve never been prepared and equipped with maps so good before!

I can’t wait to get on the trails and roads again but have to spend another day to get a proper tent and down sleeping bag for the coming adventures.

And while I am at it I want to thank some more people for contributions to my project:

• My sister Verena took some of her first self earned salary to guarantee her brother a warm shelter (tent) while he is on big tour! Thank you so much!
• Hans Rudolf Schaer, a fellow touring cyclist, for extending my flickr account where I put all my pictures for another year!

Over the past 1 to 2 weeks I have made some changes to the structure of the website:

• Changing Image Header, a feature that was broken since the beginning could be fixed and I’ve already put in about 30 different header images which change randomly
•  Distance Cycled and Latest News fields on the top right showing you the distance cycled so far and my latest mobile number with country code
• Categories english and german, where I am still sorting in the posts, so you can chose to only see the posts in your language
• The Recent posts and Recent comments in the right sidebar to see what’s going on
• A kind of newsletter, called FeedBurner, where you can subscribe to by putting in your e-mail address. So you will get the updates sent to you while they are still hot
• And I have put in my wishlist with gear and stuff I need or think I need