Ever played the video game, "Tubin'"?

Well, Stace and I both have and just today we lived it! We are in day 4 of WWOOFing now in the beautiful Motueka River Valley in the Northwest of the Southern Isle. The place is gorgeous, the host family is amazing, the food is epic and the work has been hard. I have assisted in shaping their pond shoreline, shlopping mud and dirt, digging a drainage ditch with Heather the host's guidance and had the gratification of finishing the ditch job by breaking the pseudo damn, and seeing the pond water flow of of the pond like toilet water down a flush. It has been great to help this family out and truly bust my ass again after 3 weeks of R&R. I have had a smile on my face for what seems like months and am enjoying every minute of this. We work about 4 hours each morning after a great 'brekky' and then sit for an even more impressive lunch. The afternoons are our's, but we have been quite satisfied to chill around the property, ride a bike or take a swim.

That brings me to the theme of my tale and the Motueka River. We decided this afternoon to take 2 of their tractor tire inner tubes up river in the good ole' Mazd'r (just like Bob Everhart's back in the 80s, by the way!) and see the valley and Mt Arthur's peak from a different perspective. We jumped into the chilly river, (kind of like taking a swim in your ice water actually) tubes in hand and headed down with the current. We are not talking about 4 & 5s here people, but there were definitely white caps and probably a 2 mixed in with a bunch of 1s. We were all smiles as we peered down into the crystal clear water, seeing the river rocks below, sometimes at 8-10 feet down, other times about 3 inches. The journey lasted about 50 minutes and was maybe 2k (that's K-I-L-O-M-E-T-E-R-S for you Americans!). The views were stunning, the water refreshing and the company perfect. We were dodging boulders at times, a stick or two and occasionally had to stand up and walk few strides to free ourselves from a rock shelf. There were no beer cans thrown and no pushing and shoving like in the video game, but there was a lot of back paddling, one arm paddling and co-chillin'! As we neared our out position, we passed a fly fisherman who had just latched onto a 16" brown trout. If I could paint, and I can't mind you, I could not have painted the experience any better. New Zealand my friends, Just do it!