The ride before Christmas

Well, Merry Christmas...this blog has been a long time coming.  Over a week ago Colin and I snuck in a little pre-Christmas ride and I got more than halfway through a blog about it when blogger lost it all - I was not amused…

But anyway, let’s see if I can remember any of the important details…

We had a few loose plans that involved a ride out East with a lunch stop at either Akitio or Pongaroa and were keen to ride the “Rising Sun” again.

After mucking around drinking coffee and admiring the new rack on the WR (Colin has a thing for racks, don’t blame him really) we got underway with a quick dash over the track and then the short stretch of gravel on Tararua Road to get us over to Pahiatua for fuel.

Fuelled up, we had a quick pootle through to Makuri before turning off on Coonoor Road which begins with seal and then changes to gravel just before the turn-off to Towai Road (the Rising Sun road).

After a week of rain the gravel was reasonably settled and definitely not dusty so I was able to ride fairly close to Colin and actually capture him on video (scroll down a wee ways for the video).  Just before the lime works the road got a little softer underfoot which caused the bike to move around a little.  At the lime works we stopped again to admire the views.

Dropping down the other side, the road is normally rougher and for once I was glad that I took a corner a little wide as upon turning around a sharp left hander there was a steer on what should have been my side of the road - phew!  The rest of the ride down the hill was relatively uneventful except for two suicidal rabbits - one of which raced off the road into the bushes and then promptly turned back around to attempt to attack my poor wee Tenere - once again my luck held out…

The tiniest of navigational errors had me take Colin out to the Waihi Falls turn-off just so we had enough room to turn around safely and back track to the Eastern bit of Waihi Valley Road.  This then took us onto Waione-Horeka Road - more decent gravel that eventually spat us out on Route 52 just across the road from the turn-off to Akitio.

It was all seal out to the blustery coast and a very unfriendly closed shop at Akitio.  No, we were not getting our lunch there today, so it was off to Pongaroa we went.

Naturally we needed to get there via a different route and that route was good ole Coast Road - a major fav of mine.  I probably wasn’t as quick through here as normal as I was running a decent headache and this probably saved a pheasant’s life.  There were two of them on the road and at first I thought I was going to hammer him while he was on the ground but he managed to get airborne right at the last minute and some quick ducking by me prevented him from giving me a Glasgow Kiss.

Cruising into Pongaroa the roads magically appeared to change to a wet-looking colour and when we parked up at the pub next to some other riders we discovered that, yes, there had been a bit of a shower and that we’d somehow managed to completely avoid it.

The other chaps vamoosed pretty much straight away which meant that they didn’t need to see us hoovering down our late lunch.  The fat pub lab didn’t get to test much of our lunch either…

And then we piked out on our original plans for more gravel and decided to gap it back to Pahiatua - both of us were not feeling that flash and deciding that a shorter ride followed by some couch surfing was a better idea (we must have been pretty near death I reckon).  In fact, we didn’t even make it home without a coffee stop in Pahiatua!

While in Pahiatua we attempted to help fix a puncture on someone else’s VTR1000 but I was embarrassed to discover that my repair kit was sitting at home on the bench.  Oh well, that meant I had plenty of dog-turds for yesterday’s ride - but that’s for another blog soon…

At least the coffee sparked us up a little as we took in Tararua Road again and then had a little play on the Pahiatua Track.  A nice way to finish off our pre-Christmas ride!

Merry Freekin Xmas!