Shake down

After all the fettling (and spending) it was time to give the WR a run and checkout the new gearing and tyres.  A message from Oldbeer on Adventure Rider inviting me to coffee on Sunday seemed like a good omen, so Sunday was the day.

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...

The next section of Makoura Road is delicious gravel all the way to Pohangina Valley East Road but I needed more gravel than that so turned right onto Pohangina Road with plans to ride as much gravel as possible.

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 👍
Gearing 👍
Brakes 👍
Clutch 👍
Camera 👍