First Day of Eco!

What a tremendous day! We started out first-thing at 6am with some yoga/stretching exercises out by the lake just before the sun came up- beautiful! A guy named Lincoln led us – we affectionately call him “Stretchy guy” and he’s very good and makes us laugh. It was actually energizing and felt really good. I was a bit late so missed meeting up with the team – but we’re going to fix that tomorrow.

Afterward, we went in for breakfast and I still couldn’t find them. It turns out that 3 of them went running together right after stretches. It was a weird feeling – all I wanted was to find my team and didn’t feel right sitting with other people until Joel came up and sat with us. After breakfast, when we finally met in the morning session all together. I felt much better – quite complete then. I’m really getting into this team thing.

Lincoln "stretchy guy"

We also got a 6th member of our team – a tuatara, which is a reptile that looks like an iguana. She’s a stuffed one, though and of course we named her Tara. She has to go everywhere with us. If we’re caught without her, we lose 15 tokens. But, we love her like one of us and we will take very good care of her. She is strapped to one of our camel-packs for safety and one of us carries her at all times. The guys on the team are so cool – they are always fine with carrying her. I even had to say that I wanted to carry her tonight at dinner so I’d get some time with her, myself. The guys are actually quite sweet with me – almost doting. They call me their leader and treat me like a bit of a princess. I have to admit that I love it.

This afternoon we had a real adventure – ropes! This meant repelling down a cliff and across a gorge. At first, I was a bit tense and not really in the zone. I wasn’t really scared just not very confident, either. My first two tries weren’t a lot of fun because of that and I was going to quit at those but Torsten went up with me for the last two and those were a lot of fun. They were down a really high cliff and I could push-off and then land on my feet going down – it was a lot of fun. The hard part was climbing up to the top of the cliff, but I have to get used to it. We also learned how to go across a ravine on a rope, which was fun but a bit harder – more work on the upper body. For the most part our team did really well but we all agreed we could have tried to stay together more. We did earn a token, though for encouraging each other, which we’re really good at.

We have an awesome team! We get along really well and all have great attitudes – no complainers, all are encouraging and we love to stick together. I hope that doesn’t change by the end of the week.

Tonight we went to a winery for dinner. It was outside among the rolling hills and the Maori performers came back to perform. Tonight it was cool because they were all outside as if they would have been historically. They also began teaching us a haka they wrote for Seagate and us. It’s very cool and now we have to learn it as a tribe to perform and hopefully win tokens.

We also made up a chant/song to the tune of the old song “Louie, Louie” from the movie, Animal House.
“Tui, Tui – oh oh we wish you luck. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Tui, Tui – oh oh we’ll kick your butts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Tui, Tui – oh oh we’re blue and bold. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Tui, Tui – oh oh we gotta go – for the gold!”

Anyway, it’s a lot of fun. We learned it on the way to dinner and worked on the haka on the way back. They really keep us busy – even on the bus rides. It’s cool but the hard part is that our team has no time to talk, strategize and build our team more. We have another handout to do – the personal histories, we want to plan and learn each others’ strengths and weaknesses, too. I kind of wish we could just go back up in the tree again for the afternoon – that was fun and easy. I guess it’s kind of like life. Just like all the speakers are saying. I guess I just wish we wouldn’t have quite so many speakers so we could have more time to team-build. Well, tomorrow we’ll do mountain biking so that’ll help. Can’t get through that my ones-self. It’ll be hard but we’ll be a stronger team for it.

The Race!

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