The day dawns grey and drizzly but at least it's not cold. Turns out to be a perfect day for biking - not too cold and no wind. The 'gang' assembled at the PGA car park and set off at a cracking pace.
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| Riding into Puketapu - it seemed a lot quicker this time. |
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| The famous Puketapu Pub. (Have promised myself that we will stop there next time) |
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| Waiting for Mary to buy a drink from the store. |
While we were in the village Bob wanted to stop at the dear little church up on the hill that he has had a bit to do with. We had a happy little time wandering through the cemetery and trying to guess the stories of the people there.
As we wandered on, Fenton and Doug were able to tell us interesting little snippets about the district. Although Fenton did tell an outrageous story that he heard from a chap they met in a pub - Apparently while travelling through France, one of the travel companions (mother-in-law?) died. It was too expensive to process the body where they were, so they strapped it to the roof of the car. They stopped at some village to buy a sandwich and when they emerged from the shop, they discovered the car had been nicked! (Sounds a likely story)
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| The first gate we had to hoof our bikes over. |
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| Nearly back. |
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| Looking back up the Tutaekuri |
It was every bit as delightful as last time although it did seem a bit shorter. Maybe that was because more limestone had been laid and most of the gates that had been previously locked were now open. We only had to hoist our bikes over two this time. We could see there was more work being done near the end of the track but it didn't really affect us as we stuck to the old one for now. It was great fun biking with new people (well one new person, Mary) and the others seemed to enjoy it just as much as us.
We are now trying to figure out how to make the ride a few k's longer. My smartphone tells me that we only worked off 506 calories or the equivalent of 5 pears! I didn't tell it about the thick chicken and egg sandwiches and muffins I scoffed when we arrived back at the cars.
