November 6

The day started with a 6 mile run for Renee and Alison catching up with Internet things. Grocery shopping for the trail and thenwe were off to church. Maria led singing and it was fun to worship in a new place. We had to skip out early though, as we had a several hour drive to our hike. The drive took longer than we thought and after several false starts, we figured out where we needed to be for pickup to get to the start of the trail. We parked our car and Big Bush shuttle took us to the start of the Wakeremoana great walk. It was actually quite lucky that the shuttle arrived as he was nots planning on picking us up. We started up at 3:30pm. And we mean up. People had told us it could take us up to 9 hours to get us to our destination  we hoped this wasn’t true as we would have arrived at midnight. We knew it was only 8.8km so we knew it couldn’t be too bad. What we hadn’t realized is that when we looked at thee legation gain it didn’t say feet but meters so instead of going 600 ft we gained 1800 ft. No wonder we were feeling so out of shape. The sign said the hike would take 5 hours we were happy to report it only took us 3 hrs and 45 min. That included some breaks. We arrived at the Paneke hut as it was getting dark and started making our meal of teriyaki chicken. There were 5 guys there already 3 Germans and 2 native NZ who had spent some time in the states. The one German fellow, quizzed us about what was happening in politics and in general had good conversation. He says he can’t decided where to live Germany or NZ. Hiker midnight hit around 9 but we both read for a bit.