Archery in Methven – Day 209

Today we are celebrating Robin’s birthday by making like Robin Hood in the woods doing some archery.

Today’s Robin’s 30th birthday so to celebrate I’m making him a cheesecake although it’s not your average cheesecake it’s more like rolls of cheese stacked on top of each other shaped a bit like a cake but he is French so he digs that sort of thing.

And because he’s so old I also get him an old person’s board game it’s Rummikub and my Nana used to love it.

So after a bit of a yummy breakfast he are hitting the road passing the Rakaia Gorge that we’re going to be exploring in the next few days so don’t miss that but we are making our way toward Terrace Downs Resort and more specifically a point called Windwhistle point world famous for well it’s wind and we are going to be meeting Neil from Newzengland for a bit of archery in the woods.

We are following Ted which is the dog and Neil which is the guy into the woods into a little bit of a weird as shack which has only three walls. This is because it’s an archery shack there is heaps of bows everywhere and neil is giving the rundown on how to be the best archer ever.

Under the judging eye of Ted, Neil is giving us heaps of tricks on how to handle the bow and how to make sure we hit bulls-eye every single time. Let the bow do it. Not bad.

Neil always knows where the arrow is gonna end up even before we shoot.

Now just open your fingers and let the arrow go. Nice!

This is the first time that we’re doing archery and we both manage to pick it up pretty quickly. Neil has some awesome teaching skills and as soon as we’re picking up that bow we feel absolutely epic like we’re Legolas in The Lord of the Rings or Katniss from the Hunger Games. It’s so awesome to do.

Even from watching from the side, neil knows exactly what little movements we need to do in order to score bulls-eye his teaching methods are really awesome and I’m super surprised at how good our scores are getting and once we have fine tuned our firing power Neil is setting us some different challenges to do as well so we can get super competative.

We’re doing challenges to beat each others scores as well as working together to get the highest score between us but of course not every arrow hits the target so it’s a bit of a mission to find them in the forest.

it’s here. The arrow of shame.

Archery is really awesome it’s actually one of the world’s oldest sports and there is actually a lot of skills involved it’s not all about just trying to aim and going at it. It’s about behaving with your entire body to give the right motion to the bow and therefore to the arrow and make it bull-eye. it’s really fun and it’s really challenging to make it happen consistently.

Archery is definitely a sport that I could see myself getting into really quickly. It’s a lot of fun and there’s a lot to it and Neil is keeping it super entertaining by giving us so many various challenge. I usually get bored of stuff really quickly just because well I have a short attention span but he’s keeping me involved all the way through it.

And archery has a really interesting history here in New Zealand it was introduced by the English settlers when they came here and it was just introduced as an entertainment method as a sport basically it was never used as a hunting method or as a fighting method because they already had powdered weapons and the Maori back in the days used mostly spears and clubs to hunt and fight each other archery was never part of their culture.

As Laura and I are entering the last round of our competition the clash of the bow the battle of the arrows it is neck and neck we are only one arrow apart at the end and it’s all about making it into that goddamn yellow circle.

Ted is not impressed as we are finishing the competition without a single arrow in the yellow circle but neil is counting the score and counting up our final tally and it turns out that I am the winner he’s crowning me the winner of this competition but that’s probably just because it’s my birthday.

All in all it was great fun playing with bows and arrows in the woods we are now making our way back toward the Mt Hutt Bunkhouse we’re gonna be spending another night because there is much more to explore in the area.

Today is Robin’s 30th birthday the big 3-0.archery in

Argh, I don’t want to turn 30 years old.

I thought I would decorate the campervan put some lights up and put some balloons all around the campervan make it look like a childrens birthday party just to give him the illusion that he is young except he is not…