Last ride

 ...of '21.

No New Years Eve ride for this kid - the roads tend to be crazy - but, I did have my arm twisted to go out the day before...

Thursday's ride kicked off with Colin and Adi rocking up for coffee and then us finding our way out the valley.

This was supposed to be a road ride but I was on the Tenere, Colin his GS and Adi his Wee, so I just had to take them out through Pohangina Road - it was fun the day before on the WR so why wouldn't it be fun on the big bikes?

Well, yeah, it was just as mint but we did have the brakes put on us for a bit when we came up on some chaps moving some cows and calves (scared the crap out of the lad at the back pushing them along with his quad).  We eventually pushed our way through and were back into it and managed to avoid hitting a group of pedestrians wandering all over the road...

Then we popped back out onto Pohanigan Valley East Road and got stuck into some great sealed roads.  Along the way there were a couple of spits and the road was damp in places - always pays to give this road a bit of caution when wet.

I also showed a bit of caution on a certain bridge and checked to make sure that Adi got across ok.  No problemo, he seems to have mastered ice riding in summer...

More great roads got us from Rangiwahia to Mangaweka where stopped to check out how the new bridge is coming along and I took the only pictures of the ride...

Nearly there - I still prefer the old one

Busting out onto SH1, we turned South and pootled our way down to Hunterville where we turned off to make our way across to Fordell and Whanganui.

This was pretty much my favourite bit of the ride.  The road had obviously been majorly hammered by the bad weather (and some of the damage was amazing) with plenty of damaged seal, gravel sections and even some repairs (stop and go guy in action) in progress as we road across.

Why was the ride so good?  Well, I guess it was the first decent run on the Tenere it is just an outstanding bike on these sorts of roads.  That and it was just magic maintaining a nice pace through some delicious corners, listening to some primo tunes - it doesn't get much better than that...

Hitting Whanganui we got stuck in some seriously slow traffic crawling through town but eventually found that healthiest of lunches at KFC 😣

After lunch we detoured around the main street, took in some of the cemetery circuit (no racing this year due to some feeble reason or other) and purchased some expensive fuel at the BP before retracing our steps back out to Fordell.

Instead of riding right through to Hunterville again we turned off onto Turakina Valley road and made our way through to Marton on the truly magnificent (sealed) Makuhou Road.  A zip across Halcombe and Colyton then got us back to my place and more coffee.

Nice way to end the year - better than staying up all night...