Sutter is Riding for Rakiura

Thanks to all for the tremendous support of Riding for Rakiura, the 555-km bike ride from Wellington to Rotorua. As I told many of you when I thanked you for your donation, I'm in awe of the generosity shown by friends and family toward a cause I feel is quite worthy. Thank you! If you haven't received a personal message from me, that's because you made your donation on Givealittle as a Guest Giver. This service is great, but the downside is that we don't get to see who our Guest Givers are; you're fully anonymous. If you'd like me to know who you are -- and haven't already emailed me -- please drop me a line. I'd love to thank you personally. In less than 36 hours, we depart Christchurch for the drive to our starting point near Wellington. The South Island riders will hop in a van at 6 a.m. Saturday morning, loaded with our gear and a bike trailer in tow. We need to get to Picton (www.picton.co.nz/) for the 1:10 pm Cook Strait ferry crossing. We'll meet with the rest of the riders on Saturday night at YHA Wellington, get a good night's sleep and then depart at a slightly more reasonable hour (relatively speaking, 8 am is manageable!) on Sunday. You can follow our ride progress online several ways: I've been drafted into coordinating some blog entries on the http://www.stewartislandproject.blogspot.com"" Stewart Island Project blog. I hope we'll post updates each evening -- probably by 9 pm local time; 1 am PDT. If you're of the Twit-persuasion, follow us on http://twitter.com/yhanewzealand"" Twitter, where another rider will update our progress when she can. Info about our route and other ride details is on the http://www.yha.co.nz/Sustainability/Stewart+Island+Project/RidingForRakiura.htm"">YHA NZ website Lastly, depending on how ambitious I'm feeling, I may update http://sutterschu.blogspot.com"" my own blog But no guarantees (as you'll see by my lack of recent posts there) Time to start packing! Sutter