I have been researching quad biking adventures for my planned trip to the West Coast of New Zealand this Summer. Seems there are a great many quad biking outfits around the country. I came across these folks that do adventure tours like jetboating and such. One of their packages is a quad bike trip which appears to be heaps of fun. A youtube video (follow link above) came up on my google search and they have a website with some cool clips there too.

While I am an extreme sport sort of person, I have a bit of hesitation doing the quad biking. This is because when I was mountain biking a few years ago, I took a wrong turn on a trail and went over the handle bars. When I tried to get up, my arm felt really strange. A friend observed me standing up straight, and out of my right shoulder was a pointy bit of bone poking through the skin. It was my collar bone broken in two!

Interestingly, it should have been excruciating pain. But it felt more “uncomfortable” than anything else. My friend looked as pale as a white horse, so apparently it adversely effected him more than me. Fortunately he had a cellphone, so he rang an ambulance and it came to pick me up.

It took me 2 years to get back on a bike because I remained somewhat paranoid about a recurring debacle.The collarbone wouldn’t heal, either, and required a general anesthetic surgery to screw a metal plate into my body – securing the bones so they would re-fuse. I didn’t get the plate removed for an entire year. It even set off the metal detector once when I went through LAX. What a hoot!

So, here I am, ready for some new extreme. Quad biking and jet boating adventure tours are the next logical steps to get my courage back up, and then perhaps I will graduate to more dangerous endeavours.

Gosh, I so love being human.