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Last week I found out that "The Cross Canada Project" has been accepted into VIMFF (Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival), which is a very nice way to start 2010!

The full list of movies looks amazing and there's a lot worth seeing. My film will be shown on January 26th as part of "World Travels on Bike Evening" at the H.R. Macmillan Space Centre. Tickets are available online or at any North Face store in Vancouver.

I wish I could be there, but more importantly, I want to visit the Space Centre!

I knew it was inevitable, but last month I finally received my first trespassing warning from New Zealand police. My friend Hugh and I drove a few hours to photograph an abandoned psychiatric hospital, which was a lot of fun until we found ourselves crouched down in some tall grass hoping several flashlights don't find us. The "getting caught" part went pretty smoothly, and we even got a complementary ride in the cop car back to our vehicle, stashed several kilometers away. The hospital itself was very interesting, although all of the buildings had been gutted and several were being used by the NZ Army for practice. The practice, as far as I could tell, was how-to-blow-a-hole-in-reinforced-cement-walls practice.

When the police and the owner caught us, they asked us to delete all the photos on our digital cameras. The last time someone asked me to do this, I ended up spending the night in a jail cell. This time, I co-operated and formatted the entire card. Thanks to PhotoRec, I will be posting the pictures soon!

On Wednesday, Mel and I are leaving to go do the Otago Rail Trail which should be pretty cool. The Otago Rail Trail is a great example of how bicycle friendly infrastructure can bring in lots of business, people and money to an area. We just finished building up an old mountain bike for her, which should be perfect for the trip. I'm really looking forward to this trip, especially because it's not on roads. It's always less stressful when you're off the roads, and the news last week of a German bicycle tourist being killed still has me a bit shaken up.

A few friends just finished a nice 900 KM bike tour on the South Island, and they had quite a few stories of close-calls and things being thrown at them. I've probably done close to 10,000KM of touring in North America and I have never had something thrown at me... very odd. I think if New Zealand wants to keep marketing itself towards bicycle tourists (apparently more money can be made off bicycle tourists than regular tourists), then some serious infrastructure needs to be built. There are a lot of narrow twisty roads that are classified as state highways with a lot of heavy traffic and should probably be avoided. It's nobody's fault, these roads were never meant to see this much traffic and they definitely weren't designed with bicycles in mind. That being said, there are also a lot of absolutely wonderful smaller roads with hardly any traffic on them that are perfect for bicycle touring. The challenge for planning tours here is to find a way to string all of these good roads together while staying off the state highways. The gov't is apparently investing millions in some sort of national cycleway that seems like it will be a dirt/gravel track, but if you ask me I think some of the money should also go to developing a network of bike friendly signed routes on low traffic roads between cities. Tourists don't have weeks to spend scouring Google Earth for tiny roads and checking street view to see if they are sealed or gravel, and I think that's why most end up on the large highways. Give them a map of well-chosen cycle routes and put policies in place to widen shoulders on those roads as regular construction happens.

In other bicycle news, Mel and I are planning to do a few weeks of touring in Samoa in August! The tentative plan is to ride right around Savai'i and hopefully stay in some homestays, eat lots of coconuts and hopefully find some Kava.

In non-bicycle news, I've ordered a Saleae Logic Analyzer to do some research into a possible project. I'm hoping to develop something to control a motorized telescope base so it can be used for time lapse photography, which is something I've been doing a bit of recently. I'm not sure if anything will come of this project, but it will be fun!

Today at lunch, we listened to someone with a megaphone in front of Parliament talking about how Feminism is to blame for the high suicide rate among Males in New Zealand. Nice try...

Anyways, It's sleepy time.