As a relative newbie (got my Wii Fit + in December, 2010) I just wanted to say thank you for all the great inspiration info you have put on this board. Because of you, in the past months, I earned my new bike, found all 20 balloons, and spent a lot of time learning to jump onto roofs. I also stopped banging into doors trying to get the blasted things to open (oh, thanks for the April Fools joke, I was really happy for about 10 seconds). Now I spend my cycling time trying to reduce how long it takes me to find all 20, and I try different routes. I do not want to include reincarnation jumps, but I never would have continued to try to take the duckling lake shortcut without reading here that it was possible. And occasionally I still go jump on roofs.

A question - does the Wii not remember my balloon popping time unless I finish the game to 30 minutes? I was very slow today and it still came up "Congratulations! A new record!" when I know for a fact it was probably one of my slowest times ever. I usually just save my time after hitting all 20 balloons but should I finish up all 30 minutes in order for the wii to remember my lasted record of balloon popping?

Welcome to the forum. When you start your next run , after just a few seconds the wii should tell you your best time was "..." I wish also it would do it at the end but we have to calculate that one ourselves for some reason.

You can abandon with saving your fitness cash using the B button. Free Course always starts from near the last point you saved (button B) or finished the 30 minutes.

Take also a look into the Fitgameforum wiki:
wiki/index.php/Island_Cycling

I will start writing down the times to see if it is consistant from one ending to the next beginning. I know that I almost ran out of time today - I made a couple of trials and "wasted" time so I just finished up the cycle with very little time left on the clock, not really trying except to get all 20 before the clock ran out, and still got "Congratuations A new record" which made me think my Wii is not actually keeping track of my time at all. That made me wonder if I needed to actually let the timer run out of time in order to keep my score . . . somewhere. I know it does not display it (why NOT?!) but I thought for sure if it was going to tell me "New Record" it must actually know what I have done in the past. Strange.

Still addicted to it, though.

I don't think you have to finish the 30 minutes to get accurate times. What I DO think is that no matter how long it takes you to pop all 20 balloons, the wii will tell you that you have a new record and show your best time. At least that's been the case with me.

Confirmed. There's a bug in there somewhere, so it does as you have seen. For me it is worse, because I broke something somewhere way back and got a time of zero, so now I cannot get an exact time even for breaking my existing real record, 'coz it's never as good as 00:00.00.

cynique wouldn't it be worthwhile to just add a new character to the wii plaza or failing that delete your persona in the current wii and make a new one?

Deleting the current Mii is a "not so good" idea because you lost all data including weight and all other things.
Setting up a new Mii using for cycling is a far better idea.

Yes, and I have created the Mii, but not yet registered it in Wii Fit Plus.