The Australian cavalry made up of myself, Joe Sheppard, Jake Bowen, Rhys Hillier, Allan Hardy, Dane Searle and Simon Makker landed into a very cool Dunedin airport flanked by cows and farmers.  Not what you'd call an international airport and the processing times aren't great either. 

We hit the road in two hire cars, Joe Smakker and I in the small Kia Rio and the other boys in the big Ford Territory - ripped off!  It was with Joe pushing his knees into my front seat but it was all made better with the quick stop in to a bottle store to get some roadie's. 

By 6pm we rocked in to Otapiri Gorge which is where the NZ Farm Jam is already happening, there were riders hitting up the BMX and MTB sections, people working on dirt bikes and the worst news of all, Nick Franklin standing at the front of Dan's house with his arm wrapped up and ready to drive into Invercargill hospital with Levi Sherwood with a suspected broken arm.

Spewing!  So now one of the kiwi OG's is out of the game and surely out for a couple of months and it definitely put a damper on the high spirits we had of looking at these incredible rolling green hills. 

The story goes that Nick was coming into the ramp when his bike spluttered, he's twisted the throttle to hopefully revive the big KTM and it's sucked a heap of petrol and really let rip off the ramp.  Then somehow he's ended up disembarking mid-flight to a belly flop on the downramp.  So that pretty much was the end of practice.

Things got worse for him when Nick and Levi were sitting in Invercargill hospital with a Radiologist's strike going on so nobody would be able to X-Ray his arm.  They sat there for 6 hours until midnight before being told to go home and maybe come back in the morning.  Wow.  What hospitality!  And on top of things Nick was told he was an idiot by nurses at the hospital and she was trying to tell him that there is no such thing as a 'Scaphoid' bone in the hand.  What an idiot.

So now Nick is back in hospital this morning to see whats wrong and I'll have a verdict for you in tonight's update. 

So now it's day 2, there's been a little bit of rain but we're about to head out and try ride the track and see how it goes for our first practice.  Check in for some photo's soon!