2021 TT2000 - Coming Home Part 2

So following a great meal at the Cardrona Pub and a night at Kelly's cool little cottage we were ready to tackle a new adventure.

Kelly runs The Cardrona, a horse trekking and quad bike tour operation and she was good enough to organise a ride up into the hills for us.  I doubt you'll need much help in deciding what form of transport we were going to use...

Check out our awesome (and most trendy) safety shorts!

The Yammy quads were great - CVT trans, so just point and squirt!

Kelly led us up some farm tracks into the Pisa Range.  It was reasonably warm but windy in places but one thing we weren't missing was some pretty awesome scenery to gawk at.

Crossing over the top of the hill, we were led down into the next valley to check out Meg Hut.

Meg hut is an old musterers hut and apparently the musterers used to spend the days charging around after sheep in all sorts of weathers.  Apparently they were allowed one sheep a day as tucker, along with a bit of flour and tea and whatever else they could pack in on their nags.  It was a long way to go for takeaways.

Oh, and the name?  Well apparently Meg was quite friendly with musterers...

After checking out the hut it was time to climb back up the hill and drop back down into Cardrona.  The views continued to fail to disappoint.

What a neat adventure!  Thanks Kelly, we had a blast!  Apparently we need to go back in winter...

And there is video:

After all that hard work we had worked up a wee appetite so off we went in search of somewhere to eat:

Following our graze it was time for us to vamoose.  But first we had to work out which way to go.  A quick weather check told us that pretty much the entire South Island was about to get wet - particularly the West Coast...

So we decided to go up the middle and just see where we ended up.  That is until I dosed off and missed the turn to Tarras...

We ended up taking an unnecessary loop through Hawea Flat and back out onto SH6 and bound for Haast.  After kicking myself for the (basic) navigational error I pulled over and a quick roadside decision was made to carry on up the coast instead.

Well, it was well worth it.  Even though it was very windy (never seen Lake Hawea with such a chop), the ride through to Haast and then up the coast is always spectacular.  We got blown silly but after topping up our fuel in Haast we carried on up to Fox for a breather.

Arriving in Fox, the place was dead.  Normally you risk getting run down crossing the road but covid has really killed tourism here and there was only one other bloke in the cafe/bar when we stopped.  We had a quick graze and yakked to the other patron for a while before saddling up and carrying on North while the weather was good.

Just South of Hokitika we ran into the rain.  Luckily it was pretty light but when we hit Hokitika we decided to look for a place to stay.

Only photo I took on the trip up the coast - doh!

A quick browse on Booking.com found us some really cool digs.  We ended up with our very own 3 bedroom house for the night - oodles of room, a carport for the bikes and all for the cost of a motel - nice!  We hit the hay to the sound of rain on the roof...