Making my way North

Today I had to ignore my sore butt and start heading Northwards by first heading
West...

Somewhere near Arthur Pass

Further up the road I stopped by a gold mine to see if they had any jobs going but there was nobody at reception...

Out to lunch I think...

Then after scaring some mountain bikers on a gravel track I stopped for a paddle in a lake.

And finally after a 600km day I ended up in Richmond - nearly home...

Puddling about

Today the weather was a little bit average (rain and a brisk, cold wind) so I didn't quite do all the riding I had planned.  I still managed to do just over 200km puddling around on the peninsular.

Looking down on Akaroa

Lighthouse road - about as far out as you can go

Up high looking back towards Akaroa

Slightly better weather when I got back into Akaroa

So, hopefully the weather will be a bit better tomorrow as I have a reasonably big day planned to get me to Richmond.  Oh, and my butt hurts....

2018 TT2000 done!

Yep, back in Christchurch after 2,300+km of tickee-touring a chunk of the Southern end of the South Island.  No rain, no tickets and only a few GPS issues...



Even time for a coffee break this morning - cost me 15mins though...

Add caption

I did manage to sleep more than 2 hours...

Happy with my moving average - there was gravel...

So, now it's time to kick back for a bit before some more tickee-touring....

Proper fun

Another quick blog from the road...

Today I met up with Al in Blenheim to tackle the Molesworth again.  He must have been a little keen as he was early!



Blenheim

Our first leg took us up over Taylor's Pass (first time for me).  There had been quite a bit of rain overnight so this first ford had a reasonable amount of fast flowing water in it.



It only took us about 20mins to cross over and onto Acheron Road and 200km of fantastic riding.  I have a lot of pics hiding on my camera and plenty of video for a more detailed post so here we are 200km later.

Nearly in Hamner

Looking back the way we had come

14km later we had dropped down into Hammer for a late lunch.

Did you enjoy that Al?

After my nice sandwich I said goodbye to Al and made my way down to Christchurch.

The TT kicks off tomorrow...

It has begun...

And my USB card reader has died so I can't get pictures off my good camera - only the phone...

Charging up

It had been a while since the Connie had a decent run and with her going to be ignored for a few more days I decided to take her for a quick run on Saturday.

It was quite nice when I got underway, still a little overcast and quite a bit cooler than it has been lately.  I even zipped up a few vents in my jacket - for a while.

I was a little unsure exactly where I was going to go and for how long but I had all day to mess around if I wanted and wandered my way over to Colyton and then onto Vinegar Hill.

On the Hill there were some traffic lights controlling traffic at some roadworks but otherwise the road was its usual fun self.  A commodore driver even waited for me at the one lane bridge.

With a bit of a plan forming (took a while) I puttered on into Hunterville and turned off onto Ongo Road to make my way over to Fordell.  The road was a little messy in places where slips were getting cleaned up and I also caught up with some cattle being moved along the road and into their yards.

Not far past the Turakina Valley Road turn-off I ran into a nice set of roadworks.  Time to stop for a few pics of the big Adv bike...

As you can see from the video below, the mud didn't last long, turning into some quite rocky stuff instead...

By the time I hit Fordell things had really hotted up so I decided to return home via Marton rather than dropping into Wanganui as I had planned.

There were more roadworks on SH3 but I turned off at Turakina to take some back roads into Marton where I parked up for some lunch.  Lunch eaten I took the very boring way home by riding into Bulls (for fuel) and then more of SH3 into Palmy.

So just a short one but good to give the Connie a bit of love before she is ignored for a spell...

Googling

I was mucking around looking at some of my pictures online and when I right-clicking in Google Photos I decided to check out the highlighted option below:

Google didn't find another copy of the picture (that's good I 'spose) but worked out that there was a dirt road in the pic.

But then when I clicked further down the page on "Visually similar images" it did indeed find a lot of similar images.

And the first one was even one of George's, with his Tenere front and centre...

Pretty cool!

Me leaving work tonight...

True story...

Picture pinched from an Advrider post that had pinched it from http://www.wilkinsonphotography.com.au/  Some cool pics there too...

Waitangi Tag

Yes, today was a public holiday so no excuse not to go for a ride eh?  Well, I left it a bit late...

I mucked around all day doing other things and kinda ran out of time to go for a decent blast.  But then I got a notification that there had been a post in the Manawatu Tagorama thread - worth investigating...

Sure enough Phil had been out and about and the tag was only about ten minutes from my place...

Little Yammy

Rather than dragging the Connie out, the Tenere got the job and I also sort of got to try out the new suspension settings I'd been playing with.  Only sort-of as I've hardened things up a bit for a wee trip down South and I couldn't really be bothered loading her up with the kitchen sink and everything else I'll be packing just to test things out...

Bigger Yammy

Tag nabbed I then just had to go in search of a new one, somewhere...What must have been hours (perhaps) later I found a likely candidate and made my way home to see if Owl had beaten me to the punch.

Somewhere near someplace...

He hadn't so now it's time to see who goes out after my tag...

Blast from the past

A little bored tonight.  Then I realised I didn't ride either bike in the weekend (sob), so didn't blog either.  I did however, play around with the Tenere in the shed and I may have been browsing farkle-oriented websites...

Anyway, just so I've got something to blather about - I was looking through a folder o'pics on my laptop and spotted this photo.

I'm not even the photographer but someone else (manning a Grand Challenge checkpoint) nabbed it and I really like it.  You'll notice that the sun wasn't quite up yet so I'd done a reasonable time considering we'd had to ride around East Cape...

It was on my last Grand Challenge (no more Rusty Nuts MC, and yes, I'm still missing a year bar and 10 year mug) and was about 1,500km into the ride.  I picked up the lost ZX-14 pilot just out of Feilding and he followed me up through Taihape and let me chase the rabbits off Fields Track for him on the way to the final checkpoint.  Leaving the checkpoint he knew where he had to go and did a disappearing act - like ZX-14's are capable of...and I hadn't been mucking around either...

Anyway, enough of the reminiscing, tomorrow is a public holiday...