Happy Birthday to Me!!! (A self-centred title)

I will start blog entry by thanking people for their Birthday messages and anyone that didn't give me one is in for big trouble. I believe this is the first time I have spent my birthday outside the UK, I believe that I flew back to England on my birthday once. It was a pretty awesome day we couldn't have asked for much better weather another really sunny day which was pretty lucky cause we had decided the night before that we would go to the Christchurch Gondola (cable car) and mountain bike a route which would take us back to the bottom.

I woke up pretty early must have been the excitement of having to open all those presents. The real reason was we wanted a full day in Christchurch and after Ollie got up he gave me a present which was some AAA batteries which I've been meaning to get since I bought some small speakers for my ipod in Thailand. Now we can play some banging tunes!! After making some lunch to take with us we went to catch the bus which took us to the Gondola. We then took the Gondola to the top of the hill giving us awesome views over Christchurch and surrounding areas. After a few minutes to look around we followed the walking path towards the road where a guy who seemed pretty excited by a car that went over the edge of the cliff the other day met us with the bikes. After he left we were on our way winding down the roads cool as anything little did we know what was just round the corner, quite a large and long incline!! It wasn't too bad to start with but as it continued it got harder and a little steeper until we reached Castle Rock, I briefly stopped once on the way up to check Ollie was still behind me and on reaching the top both of us needed a moment to recover, our recovery was aided by the sight of the road going down hill again. We continued our ride after a quick exploration of Castle Rock to an off road track where a quick pit stop for a sandwich had to happen. Going down the track it rapidly occurred to me that the front brake didn't really work and the back wasn't in the best of conditions, it was going to be fun trying to stop! I let the bike free wheel for a couple of seconds and tried the brakes it took quite some time to slow down therefore most the way down hill I pressed the brakes as hard as possible. At the bottom of the track and now back on the road both of our hands hurt from braking this we decided definitely wasn't as bad as the cyclists we saw going up the hill, that is plain crazy! I then decided to extend our route slightly to do a bit more cycling on the flat which followed a stream (Ollie said as it was my birthday I had to make all of the decisions, he was just using this as an excuse to be indecisive). I believe the slight extension to our route was well worth it as we got to do some good cycling on the flat before getting to a long road which lead us straight back to the Gondola but not before another last incline which this time was too much for me as I knew the last stretch to the Gondola was very steep I took a short break before the final ascent.

In the evening we went out to a place called Dux du Lux for dinner. It specialised in seafood and had it own brewed beer. As the food and beer were good and we were lazy we ended up staying there to drink a few more beers instead of heading to town.