Nov 15 - Riders and Climbing

10 AM we were up at at 'em getting the internet figured out for the Riders game. The wifi was too slow so we had to buy 4 hours worth of time for the desktop land line connection at $4/hr. But it did work well and we got good streaming video from an online feed (TSN only has online telecast for Canadian computers...) for the whole game. The first half was terrible play and it was starting to look like the internet money we paid was a waste. But the Riders miraculously turned it around and won in OT for a huge finish that left us cheering in the otherwise empty hostel (everyone else was doing the alpine crossing hike that we had done out of Taupo). After the big win, we chilled out for awhile but the hostel was very boring with only 2 TV channels and no one else there. So we signed up for wall climbing and spent a couple hours doing circuits in the indoor wall climbing room inside the hostel. Around the time our arms and wrists were so sore we had to stop climbing, the hikers arrived back at the hostel, so we returned the climbing gear and chatted about their day. For dinner we cooked up leftover BBQ meats for the Magic bus people (I was grill master, because after all, I am a Canadian, and we do BBQing pretty damn well). Then B and I grilled up the chicken legs we had bought for supper (not knowing at that point that there would be extra meat leftover from the BBQ the previous night) and we had some Uncle Ben's rice to go with it. Delicious. After dinner, a bunch of us had some drinks and chatted in the hostel kitchen for a couple hours, then went for one drink at the pub next door, then off the bed early. Everyone was much more tired than us due to hiking 20 KM that day, but we were fairly tuckered from the wall climbing. More sleep is always a good thing.