Updatey

This is Titirangi Bay! Wow - so lucky!

Haha

Lots of riding since my last post! What stories shall I share?

A short recap:

From the Waikato River Trail, we were battered and exhausted. See...

Bruises
Delirium

huh?

Gratefully, these lovely people took saw us fatigued girls and helped us regain our strength to continue our crazy kiwi venture! Thank you Craig and Wendy and AvantiPlus Taupo!

After Taupo, we set off to the W2K trail - a 16 km treat of a trail that more or less connects Taupo to Kinloch. We found a great spot to get some shut eye for the night. Behind Kate is a downed tree whose enormous chopped trunk provided a great kitchen set-up. Thank you downed tree!

Eventually we made our way to Napier via State Highway 5 - yuck. Traffic on a holiday weekend over a busy and hilly road. But after realizing our trail riding was taking a bit longer than intended, we'd have to sacrifice a few trails to get to Wanaka in time for our race - www.iconicadventures.co.nz

Napier is known for it's art-deco architecture and vibe. It was essentially flattened by a giant earth shaking, better known as an earthquake, in the 30's. The new city was built during the hey-day of art-deconess and the city essentially decided to preserve it instead of dismantle and deconstruct it to smithereens and replace it with concrete blocks...now they have great art deco festivals.

We also had our first official pool swim in prep for swimbikerun fun in Wanaka...the pool was salt water from the ocean!

Look - I'm on the ferry from Wellington to Picton...the South Island- oooooohhhh...aaaaaahhh(to give ourselves some rest and some leeway to get to Wanaka, Kate and I realized it'd be best to hop on a bus from Napier to Wellington).

Our third official run in prep for swimbikerun fun in Wanaka. This is on the Queen Charlotte Track (what a beauty)

Yeah!! Ludo met up with us! We met Ludo in Rotorua...he's combining bike touring and woofing together for his own fun times here. Here is Kate and Ludo (I'm photo-taking) about to start the first 20km of the Queen Charlotte Track. The last7.5 km of the portion we did was not fun...a lot of bike/trailer pushing up steep hills. yeah, not fun. So we hopped on the road before it turned to gravel road to Titirangi Bay...WOW! Thanks Ludo for inviting us along. Such a fun and beautiful place...

This is Kate taking a picture of the Sound and Titirangi Bay. We are so lucky - even though we did have to climb up and over the 800m Mount Stokes to get here...yeah that means 800m of climbing from sea level first thing in the morning...lucky us :)

Memory card and this computer decided not to get along for the rest of the night...so the final update will be without pics for the time being...and therefore more speedy.

Kate, Ludo and I finished out ventures riding the Queen Charlotte Track/Sound/Road route and made our way to Pelorus Bridge...we met up with Margaret and Andrew (thanks for the lawn space and slackriding day!) again - whom we first met on our way to the bay (and special thanks to Ludo and Andrew for picking fresh mussels at Titirangi Bay and cooking them for us - yummy!).

We made it to Nelson at five pm (reminds me of a mini Honolulu - ocean, mountains, towncity beauty all in your backyard...except perhaps much colder winters). The following morning (go us!) Kate and I raced the Coppermine Epic www.coppermine.co.nz - check out the results! What a great track. I LOVE Nelson! Thanks Ludo for being our cheer person and personal photographer...it was also fun seeing people's reactions after they found out we rode to Nelson and raced the next day. One guy even recognized Kate's double braids from a few days prior while we were all on the road in full bike/trailer setup.

Our ventures with Ludo came to an end...sniffles, and Kate and I are in downtown Nelson for the night staying at the Shortbread Cottage thanks to warmshowers host Jimmy! What a treat...this is such a cozy and wonderful place if you ever need a place to stay in Nelson.

We will be off again soon to road unknown (well, don't get me wrong...we know where we are going in the next few days but it's top-secret in blogland til after it's actually been done!).

Much aloha y'all...I hope to write more story-esque posts versus update-esque posts in the future. I'm peacin' out to the good night for now. til next time :)