I met up with Oldbeer in town, skipped the coffee but did have a bit of yarn about bikes, routes etc - as you do. I also forgot to take a piccy of his Vee...
Oldbeer was keen to do the scenic route around Pohangina and Rangiwahia to Mangaweka so I decided to show him the way out there before leaving him to take the sealed route while I hit the gravel. First up was Finnis Road.
As you can see, things seemed to be working fairly well even if there was a bit of skittering around on the corrugations screaming up the hill.
From the top of the hill I simply followed the Ridge all the way through to Apiti.
I played around with the Garmin camera a little too, having set it up so that I can use the powered mount on the WR. I won't be worried about batteries on the Dusty - just SD cards...
Rather than stopping in Apiti, I carried on onto Makoura Road and even went a little (100m) off road to check out the creek at the bottom of the hill - shoulda taken some pictures at the creek but left the camera back at the bike...
Water, dead ahead... |
There was even a brand new bridge to try out.
At the turn-off for Totara Reserve I didn't and stuck to the gravel of Pohangina Road. This bit is always fast and the Tenere really snots it through there. I decided to see how Mighty Mouse would fare and flipped on the video. Trouble was, I somehow had changed the video mode to some type of time lapse mode. I could have uploaded all 8 seconds (damn that WR can fly) of it but decided to slow it down just a little...
Kinda gives the same effect as when I painfully stitch all those thousands of photos together from big rides - it's just a lot easier...
Arriving in Pohangina for the second time that day I decided that needed to carry on eating as much gravel as possible so I repeated the "Hill Climb" again and then did Zig Zag Road, Midland Road and Spur Road before returning to Ashhurst for a quick bite and then home.
A nice little 170km pootle ahead of the big event...
Tyres π
Gearing π
Brakes π
Clutch π
Camera π