February 8th, Thursday

Preparing for the big day.

Well, tomorrow’s the big day and we’re all getting ready and a bit stressed. But, I think we’ll have a great time. Today, we started of with orienteering. We were so blessed to have it this morning because it was so much cooler than in the afternoon and it will be fresh in our minds tomorrow. We even got to do our Haka again for the orienteer guides. It was almost as much fun as doing it last night.

We hiked up and down hills, used our compass and topo map and learned a lot, including a weakness that we have. We learned that we need to focus more as a team, not wander off to take pictures and we need to be more efficient. We talked about it and we’re all gonna work on it. I think that we will focus more tomorrow knowing it’s the real thing. During the week, we took our time and had fun but tomorrow I’m sure we’ll get more serious.

This afternoon, we had an awesome opportunity to build a bike for a child – Levi Collins. They gave us a dis-assembled bike and told us to get to work. Luckily, my teammates knew just what to do. I helped put on the pedals but that’s about it. Three of them are dads and the other a proud uncle so they all had a good understanding of the bike assembly. It was so cool to first see Levi with his sign that had our team number on it. He found us and we gave him his bike –it was so sweet! He’s a bit young for it, yet but he’ll grow into it. I think the 5 of us and the other teams had more fun giving the kids the bikes than than they had getting them. The guys all loved putting him on the bike and pushing him around on it. It was so cute! They are the best guys ever!

Afterward, we mainly had meetings to get us ready for tomorrow. The main orientation gave us enough info to wet our appetites but not enough to help us strategize much. The second was a Tribe meeting, which got a little tense and fast-paced for my taste. I wish we could have been more organized but we said the main things that needed to be said – safety first, help each other as teams, that sort of thing.

The race directors have set up a couple of new twists for us, which should be fun. Each tribe has a key that opens a chest that is placed somewhere along the race trail. The chest has valuable info for the whole tribe in it but there’s only one key. So, the trick is to try to get that key to the team that gets to the chest first – but, we of course don’t know which team that will be. So, we’re going to give it to the team we think might be first and then if anyone passes them, they have to turn the key over to them.

Then, there’s the Tribal Challenge, an obstacle that you can only surpass with two teams from your tribe, so when you reach it you have to wait for another team or pay a bunch of tokens to over come it. Fun twists, I think!

Well, I’m going to keep this shorter tonight so I can sleep but I do want to say again what a great team I’m on! We met together tonight to pack stuff and chat and, as captain, I asked them to go around the room and express their feelings about each other, the race tomorrow and whatever they wanted. A bit touchy-feely, I know but I think it was good to take away the stress a little and refocus our thoughts on us, as a team and our own guiding principals. It was very nice and everyone said lovely things. We all have a great time together and I am really going to miss them on Saturday! I will write more tomorrow after the race. ToaWairua! Tui!!

The Race!

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