Bike Trip!

This post is a month overdue, oops. The weekend before Camille arrived, my friend Michael and I went on a two day bike trip from Papakura to the Coromandel Peninsula.

Here' s a map of our trip:


View bike trip 1 in a larger map


We took the train to Papakura early Saturday morning. We didn't bring any food for the whole trip because we planned to buy it along the way:


A lot of views like this:


And autumn leaves:



At the very top of our steepest climb Michael spotted a pair of very exotic wild chickens and couldn't resist the chance to do a bit of herding:


And then a long fun downhill through some classic new zealand bush:


And some classic new zealand sheep:



Where sea meets land:



At sunset we reach the Miranda Hot Springs!



As the sun set we realized that we didn't have any food for dinner or place to buy it. We had a huge stroke of luck though, and invited ourselves to a potluck at the Miranda Shorebird Center - where we had booked a bunk for the night. After the potluck (all we could contribute was dishwashing), a member gave a slideshow of his recent trip to North Korea to monitor bird migrations there for the first time ever. Fascinating stuff, and an unexpected highlight of our trip. Here is the group gathered round the slideshow:



The following day I got 2 flats within the first 30 minutes. And for the first time our strong tailwind became a headwind. Here we are crossing a half kilometer long one-way bridge coming into Thames. The wind was incredibly fierce coming off the water as we crossed the bridge - we only made it halfway before we had to pull to the side for the oncoming traffic to pass again.


Traveling up the Coromandel coast was so fantastic! We had incredibly strong headwinds at times but the views were amazing with ocean on one side and cliffs on the other:



There was barely any car traffic the whole trip, and by some miracle in the middle of a rainy week, we didn't get rained on until the last hour before we were picked up by a friend.

my bike

-carl