Blowing the cobwebs

The weather hasn't been the friendliest for blatting lately but you gotta keep ya hand in regardless.  Saturday was my ma's birthday so I thought I'd better head up to Napier to deliver here pressie in person.

Leaving Palmy bathing in a reasonably sunny sort of day I was soon in some pretty serious murk going through the gorge.  The wet and sticky mist hung around all the way through to Danniverke and it was nice to see the sun again.  All the way up the roads were wet and I was interested to see what sort of damage the last week's heavy rain had done to the roads.

There was obviously plenty of flooded paddocks and the some of the ditches on the side of the road were pretty full and had overflowed onto the road in places.  At least there were no slips "over the hill" on highway 50 which I always enjoy riding but there had been a few around Maraekakaho but all were sign-posted and mostly cleaned up.

After scoffing some hot soup at the old's it was time to head back and dad decided to potter back some of the way with me as his bike hadn't had a run for a while.  Every cyclist in Hawkes Bay was out on the road from about Maraekakaho to Tiko and the idiots thought that it was quite ok to be taking up all the road forcing other vehicles to stop and go around them.  Some of them must have a death wish - it'd be so easy for a car or bike to come around a corner at 100k's and take a whole bunch of them out.

Just north of Tiko we had a bit of a fright when we came up out of a hollow and a cop was coming the other way.  He pulled over and did the big 180 but decided against nabbing us when he saw that there where two of us.  Parted company with the old man at Tiko and then had another heart attack further up the road when yet another cop came out of nowhere.  Mustn't have had his radar on as he didn't even waggle a finger at me.

Back on the main road I slowed up and enjoyed dry roads all the way back to Palmy.  Reasonably chilly by the time I got back (4:15) but not a bad winter's day ride.  Looking forward to more of an improvement in the weather though...