Team Kiwi heads home.

- December 31, 2018

Another great day for a ride,

Riding in glorious sunshine

The Queen Charlotte Track is quiet in the early morning.

We ride through Reader country, Havelock

Through the Pelorus valley to the Foresters Cafe at the Rai

To Nelson for our obligatory stop at the Suter Gallery, a gem of a gallery with a great cafe.

South to Murchison and Beeches Cafe, another of our favourites

Through the Lewis Pass.

The majesty of the scenery in the Southern Alps always blows us away.

So does the extent of the road works

‘They’ mightn’t be fixing your favourite piece of road but

‘They’ are busy everywhere else.

Foresters are busy milling pine forests in the Rai, Golden Downs, and lots of other places,

There is a mountain of logs at Shakespeare Bay in Picton

Dwarfing the huge cruise liner Celebrity Solstice berthed there

All is quiet in Hanmer

It’s almost as if everywhere is on ‘pause’

Waiting for the holiday influx.

Next morning we choose the inland southern scenic route

With that we choose gusting winds

Windwhistle is aptly named.

Another wonderful family welcome and sumptuous lunch with Jude and Joe

Gardens to explore, raspberries galore

Reminiscing to be done

On our way through lupins along the roads, turquoise lakes, clouds getting lower...

We hesitate at Omarama at 7pm

Our first rain, its Dicks birthday

We decide to stop for the night,

and then the weather begins to clear.

Too late we are committed

Next morning we ride off

It was around 10° most of the way to Queenstown

As it was when we set off two weeks ago.

Grove Arm, looking across to Outward Bound at Anakiwa.

I am enjoying challenges of the long rides because of my Outward Bound Course in 2004

Pelorus Sound from near Cullens Point on the Mahakipawa Rd.

Havelock.

The tide will be in again soon.

The Rutherford-Pickering memorial (a repurposed memorial - it was originally the memorial to those lost when the Ronga sank of Cape Campbell in 1906). Ernest Rutherford and William Pickerin(NASA, JPL) went to Havelock School and so did our family.

Behind it is the Havelock War memorial bearing the names of two Readers who died in WW1. That’s where our father and other returned servicemen marched for ANZAC Day. I found Anzac services very somber affairs when I was young. No celebration involved, no glorification - just awful melancholy.

Each time we ride to Nelson we stop at the Foresters Cafe justhttp://thesuter.org.nz/ http://thesuter.org.nz/beyond the Rai Valley Township where there used to be a forestry workers camp.

Always a lovely welcome, good coffee and a scone.

The Suter Gallery in Nelson beckons, too.

First lunch in the Cafe and then a look at the marvellous Steve Fullmer retrospective ceramic exhibition.

Oh, and a little shopping.