Holiday Part 1 – Biking the Queen Charlotte

So – for the first part of Maaike and my two week holiday we headed North do do the Queen Charlotte. Why? you may reasonably ask, seeing as I’ve done it about 3 times already. Well, it’s still an absolutely great route to bike, and also, the support (in terms of boats ferrying your gear, places to stay etc.) is simply superb. The entire three days of biking (two night accommodation, boat out to the end of the track, gear ferried between stops) took about, oh, 15 minutes of organisation. It’s really great.

One advantage of travel in September is that there’s relatively few other tourists about. The negative (as shall be dived into later) is that the weather is quite fickle. Still, for the QC the weather was broadly excellent.

There are some stunning views..

Here’s a link to the same video in HD fullscreen

Also – a video of some actual biking.. it’s slightly long (12 mins) and quite badly edited… basically… video editing takes ages and I’d rather get something up and have something to blog about – than have the perfect production. :)

So yes, an excellent few days of biking was had. At the end of the QC track is where the Outward Bound school ‘campus’ is. I checked back in to see how the tree we planted was doing..

It was doing extremely well – someone (or someones) have been looking after it… the were pretty much no weeds to speak of and it seemed to be fairing well, despite the relatively foul weather we’ve been having. I do wonder how much thought they’ve given to over-crowding in the various pieces of land they’ve set aside for the various watches to plant – but hey ho, maybe there’ll be a massive transplanting operation.

If there’s one thing I struggle with it’s this concept of 20 days holiday a year… especially if you can’t get unpaid leave. In one tiny respect it makes the time you do spend on holiday that much more ‘precious’ as you have had to wait so long to accumulate it, but generally I’d far rather less cash and more time off. My current employer is excellent, but as we’re basically busy all the time (a good thing) getting unpaid leave is a relatively expensive thing for the company to give out. I’m not sure how this can be solved, but certainly next year for a family gathering in August I’ll be looking for at least a month off. I’ve yet to have that conversation, but I’m hopeful it will go smoothly enough.