Tuesday February 11, 2014

Well, here we are back at Chris’s house – for now we have finished our cycling touring of New Zealand.  We will continue cycling, while we are here in Auckland but not fully-loaded.

Yesterday I could not work out why Ralf wanted to cycle to Papakura, when we could have easily caught a train from Pukekohe into Auckland.  Ralf mentioned that Papakura is where we started this first part of the Grand Adventure and that is where he wanted it to finish. (We took the ferry and train out of Auckland to avoid the Auckland traffic and did the same on the return). I am so glad we did.  It was a lovely ride from Pukekohe and incorporated a lot of what we had experienced throughout the last weeks.  Headwinds, hills, flats, rural scenery (no mountains) traffic.

When we arrived at the train station at Papakura this old fella asked us where we had been? where we were going? all the usual questions asked of touring cyclists.  We told him what we had done and this was our last day of touring in New Zealand.  His comment was “Good on ya – because you are no spring chickens are you.”  Ouch!

We fly out to Australia in just over two weeks time.  We have a list of things to do, getting the camping gear cleaned, getting the bikes cleaned and serviced, pack the bikes ready to go to Oz and go over everything we have and decide if we need to keep it or send it back to Canada.

We also have time to do some touristy things around Auckland as well.  We are going over to the islands near Auckland – Rangitoto and Waiheke.  Waiheke island we can cycle on and has vineyards we can tour and taste some more New Zealand wines.  Rangitoto Island is a recently erupted volcano (600 years ago). We will walk up to the crater of the volcano.  We are also going to jump off the SkyTower and have a wander around downtown Auckland.

We are not going up to the Northland, we figure the only way we would have the time to cycle that area is to take public transport north and then cycle south.  We have decided that from now on we will take as little public transport as possible, unless we are advised to do so by locals for example “don’t cycle into Sydney”!