Wellington MTB cherry broken!

My first mountain bike ride in Wellington, NZ. It started out really nice this morning and then a storm came through again... fortunately it's coming down now and not when I was out this afternoon.

I rode from my flat in Newtown to point of interest numero one, the wind turbine. This is a long grind uphill, some on the road and some on trail; mental note good str training route. It's a service road so nothing to speak to other than the three steep sections, wind, Wind o and some more WIND. After the turbine and some great views of the Wellington harbor, city and coast it was down some rollers and a couple steep sections w/ hikers to a place called Watch hill. POI #2 was to make it to the Makara MTB park to test my mad skillz. Here it turns into single track through heavy veg, fast and tight turns and of course some mud after, um, 13 days of rain! ;) I wrecked once on this section getting some fresh mud on the new jersey.
The route dropped me out to a road where it was time for some urban assault, the path was marked, "Bike park this way" it just so happed to be 4 sets of concrete stair to chatter down; had my damn shock locked out cuz I thought I was gonna be on the road for a bit. With a 50% chance of choosing the right way at a T in the road I was wrong and asked a nice post man "Which direction to the MTB park?" I rolled up on a little parking lot w/ bathrooms and drinking water, mmmm yummy.
Grabbed a cheap and free map then took off up the Koru trail on a route that was gonna be 1-2 hours on the Average skill level. The trail up was nice and out of the wind, thank god because I was starting to get tired. I came out at an entrance to a terrain/jump subpark so I thought cool theres a way to get in over this log w/ some dirt up to the top. Full speed ahead into the dirt went my head and left shoulder. The log was wet and I came at it on a slight angle and was about 3 feet in the air as I felt my body turn sideways because of course my feet were still clipped into my clipless pedals while the bike sored sideways. To top it off a couple of kids were kick'n it watching the entire thing. They asked if i was ok and then laughed when I said "Well that sucked." So at this point I think Rob is tired enough to call it a day. So I head down a trail called live wires; the name is because the path goes over some power wire at some point. Anyway the little post next to the trail name stated "Average," ummm I don't think so! Much like what happened to me and BW in Rotorua this steep ass, stepped board bridge, came out of nowhere and I had no place to even get a look at the damn thing so there I went leaning back for dear life hoping that I have some room to maneuver at the bottom. Not so much luck, with a sharp 85deg right turn I was catching my breath as I fought through three more rock step areas to finally pull up and check my shorts. Thank god it was only mud... Anyway the rest was steep, fast and curvy but challenging because I was either scared shitless or seriuosly tired. I then took the road home for another 30 minutes or so.

As I'm looking at the map of the Makara park, livewires is a difficult... lot of good that does on the map and not on the damn trail marker...

The goal for tomorrow, Sunday, is to take on part of the Mt. Victoria area closer to home base.