The story goes something like this:
A couple of friends and I are vacationing in Auckland NZ. I get a PM from Tony Melton asking if we want to do some riding. How could I pass it up? So we meet at some big open space in the middle of down town Auckland (Tony, some help on the name please). As I didn’t have a uni of my own down there, Tony let me borrow one of his two custom made ones.
For the fist time I had more fun watching someone else ride then riding for myself. Until then, I had never seen someone ride who was better then myself (this is entirely a function of me not seeing any other riders, not a reflection of my skill). Tony showed me all kinds of skills, mostly freestyle and some trials.
One of the best parts of riding in NZ during winter is not sweating. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is here (in Hawaii) or what time of day, if you are riding, you are sweating.
This encounter just strengthens my view that unicyclists are very nice people. I have never met a unier I didn’t like.
Welcome back. Thanks for sharing the pics and it looks like you had some fun. Too bad they’re kind of dark and don’t show much of the country though. How much riding did you do?
Thanks Jason,
We were only able to ride one night, maybe 3 hours. We started riding around nine and finished shortly after midnight (or something like that). I have many more pics of NZ, I just didn’t want to clutter the gallery with non uni pics. I am in the process of uploading the pics to another free pic server. I’ll tell you when it’s done.
By the way, the first few pics are of my friend Adrian. He is the one that’s from NZ but lives in Hawaii now. Clifton, the other traveler, didn’t make it into any of the uniing pics. Mostly cuz he doesn’t uni.
Hey, that’s cool Daniel! One of the great things about UNi-ing is that you can virtually go anywhere and meet some really cool people. Pity you didn’t get more time to ride or go MUni’ing though.
BTW, if you head this way in the near future, we will be hosting the NZUNi weekend in October.
Thanks for the heads up Gizmo. But it’s going to be a while till I can go back.
I uploaded one more pic. It doesn’t have a unicycle in it, but I wish it did. It’s a pic of a bench system at a place called Morris and James near Omaha Beach NZ. I forgot the name of the town thing it was in, but there was a restaurant called the Rusty Pelican close to it. Seeing these benches made me realize why I always carry a uni in my car at home.
Its a nice place for riding slap back in the middle of Auckland’s main street. Skateboarders tend to hang out there. Trials riders and unicyclists also occasionally use it
Could you please tell me more about that NZUni weekend? Why did you choose October with UniNats so close? I’d love to make it over there maybe next year or something like that.
Sorry to take this thread OT- there will be an announcement soon.
NZUni weekend will be a fairly informal gathering of unicyclists in Wellington, NZ. It is in October because that is one of the few three day weekends (Labour weekend Oct 25-27th) at that time of year. It has been a number of years since the last NZ Uni nationals so it will be a chance for riders to come together and meet one another. Because at present most unicyclists in NZ seem to meet up at some masochistic mountainbike event and ride themselves silly.
Traveling around meeting unicyclists is cool. Tony and Peter are both fantastic guys. I was lucky enough to meet them both at UNICON, a place that had unicyclists I could watch that were WAY WAY WAY WAY better than me. I agree, unicyclists are all nice people…except for the Edwards family. Watch out for them. They’re really mean…all of them. And they learn stuff too fast.
Being in Hawaii, I’m sure you will soon have people inviting themselves to your favorite riding spots and asking to borrow unicycles.
