Total Time 6 hours

I do believe we have decided to walk New Zealand!!  Three kilometres uphill to the lookout and we walked 2.5 kms of it.

Half-way up the Hill

The grade varied from 12 % to 18%, impossible to cycle with loaded touring bikes, at least we could not do it.  May be we will come back after finishing the south Island and prove that these hills can be done on a loaded touring bike.

Looking Back to Coromandel

The rest of the day should have been rolling hills but again they were steep hills and we walked a lot of them.  It is very disappointing for us, but the views are absolutely stunning.  The downhills are absolutely terrifying.  My top speed today was 53.9 kms scary.

Screaming downhill – 54 kph!

We decided to take tomorrow as a rest day.  Whitianga is a lovely seaside town, with lots of services and a couple of nice camp sites.

To see the route to date check out the map in the next post.

Total time 4 hrs 48

As I started the ride this morning I kept reminding myself to remember the first 30 kms, so that when I wrote this blog tonight it wasn’t all about the monster hills again.  The first 30 kms was a beautiful coastal road, with slighty rolling hills, very easy to manage.  The road was a little narrow with no shoulder most of the way but the scenery was stunning.  At Wilson’s Bay the monster hills started.  Up hill for the next 10 kms and then a very fast downhill, up hill for the next 5 kms and then another very fast downhill.  A short flat coastal plains road and then another uphill only 200 metres, then another fast downhill.  The final 10 kms into Coromandel were relatively flat and a nice wide road with a shoulder.  We booked into the YHA and set up camp.  We have another hard ride tomorrow, 40 kms and the first 5 kms are uphill!!  This is exhausting.  I think it might be time to take a day off.

Total time 2 hrs 17mins

After yesterdays hilly ride, we decided to take it easy and only cycle to Miranda Hot Springs.  We started with more hills and after a screaming downhill top speed 45 kph we joined the Coast Road a flat road hugging the coastline.  We did have a head wind, and our average speed has dropped from 25-30 kph (in Canada) to (15-19 kph). Partially due to the weight we are carrying and partially because we want this trip to be more relaxing than our usual riding.  We are only by this way once.  We actually stopped and smelled the roses today – not literally but we spotted a Maori Community Hall and stopped to take photos.

Awesome carvings at the entrance and a boat with a scary mast head.

Mast head

We also spotted a giant Oyster catcher, not that you could miss it.  I thought it was only in Canada that had giant road side “attractions”.

 Giant Oyster Catcher

We arrived at Miranda before noon, a very short day of cycling, but we decided to stop anyway and take in the hot springs.  We also met a single female cyclist, Kara, who is also cycling around New Zealand for 3 months – she was from Vancouver and also struggled on the hill yesterday.  We will probably meet up with her again, although Kara is taking a rest day tomorrow in Thames.  We are also only going to Thames tomorrow and then hit the hills again to Coromandel on Thursday.

I am a little concerned about the hills but Betty (MHBC) told me about muscle memory.  Apparently if you have not trained for a while and then start training again your muscles remember.  I thought about this as I was cycling today and I think mine have amnesia.

Total cycling time 3hrs 10mins.

We started the day by buying me a new Garmin bicycle computer.  Birthday and Christmas present from my lovely husband.  I could not get my old Garmin to find a satellite and start to record the days ride.  I struggled with it last night trying to get it to recognize on my computer and went through all the reboots etc, but this morning it still wouldn’t work.

We still managed to catch the 10:15 ferry from Devonport to Auckland Ferry Terminal.  Bikes were free. We then took the train out to Papakura, again the bikes were free.

Now this might seem like cheating on our first day of cycling, but everyone we spoke to recommended us to take the train out of Auckland.  New Zealanders do not think very highly of their fellow car drivers.

At Papakura, we cycled to Clevedon for lunch.  A really nice road-side grocery store, with ready made sandwiches and meals, very good.  We met a couple from France who were also bike touring.  They rented equipment, and managed the hills a lot better than me.  The roads were nice rolling hills until Clevedon, then we hit large hill up to Orere Point.  What a hill, it was 4 kilometres of all uphill with 7%-14% grades.  I really struggled.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Two weeks of lunches and farewell dinners, obviously took its toll.

Beautiful scenery today, lovely quiet bays and rolling farmland.  A transport truck passed us full of sheep, we met him again further down the hill and there were hundreds of sheep all waiting to be shorn.  I even spotted the tree that is represented in everything New Zealand.

December 6th, 2013

We have lost a day, never to get it back.  The flight from LA was a bit bumpy (turbulence), but I still managed to get some sleep.  Ralf caught up on The Big Bang Series!  He managed to sleep for a couple of hours.  The service on Air New Zealand was awesome.  Very friendly flight attendants. Good blankets and pillows and the food was good.

We arrived in Auckland at 7:30 am and recovered our bicycles and assorted bags.  All have arrived in one piece and undamaged.  We had to take them through a special check as New Zealand is very careful in preventing unwanted bio-hazards to come into the country. We had declared camping and sporting equipment so everything went through the x-ray machine.

Chris was at the airport to pick us up and bought us back to his place.  We had a quick shower and went to bed for a couple of hours, joined by his cat, who slept quite happily on Ralf’s chest.

We took a walk this afternoon down to Milford and had a steep climb back up the hill.  We will start riding on Monday.