Finally Morere to Napier/Hawkes Bay

Wednesday today and finally the rain stopped and some sun came out on a partly cloudy day. My bags were packed so I paid my bill at the Tea Room and I headed to Napier.

The road to Napier is not too bad. There are a few big hills that take a bit of spinning to get to the top but they are separated enough to give you time to recover before the next one. The rest of the way is some rolling hills and then mostly flat along the coastline. The 90 mile distance along with the big hills makes it a long hard day. Or you can take the bus in 3 hours.

I did not take much for pics today. I had one beautiful shot I wanted to take but I decided to wait and take it from the top of the big hill. Unfortunately at the top of the hill there were a bunch of big trees blocking what I had thought would be a great view. It seemed as if the trees were planted with the purpose of obliterating the great view. I got a bit annoyed and was not going to go back down the hill to get the pic so I just blew it off and was not much in the mood for pics the rest of the day. Some days are like that, even in New Zealand.

I will likely just blow by Napier and keep heading down to Wellington 200 plus miles away yet. I will do it in smaller chunks of 40 or 50 miles a day. I hope the weather holds. Tomorrow has a split forecast, some forecasters say rain others say sunny and others say partly cloudy. I guess that means it is a crap shoot. I will decide in the morning. There are good bike trails for the first part of the way but then it turns into a hilly hard ride to Wellington. Here are the pics which are not up to my usual quality standards.

Still in Morere in the rain

Tuesday March 17th and it is raining again today. It is a much lighter rain but it is cold and windy also and the wind is out of the south so it would be a headwind for my bike ride. I just might end up on a bus tour of New Zealand instead of a bike tour. I am tired of all the rain. I did almost nothing today except read a couple books and a bunch more magazines I found. I also spent lots of time on the computer but did not get much done thanks to the 1989 speed of the wifi. It takes over 5 minutes to load one pic and some of them time out before they finish loading. I hate it.

I will pack my bags tonight in the hopes that I will be able to get back on the road in the morning. Napier is the next place I want to stop and it is a long ride away of about 90 miles. Plus I need to buy a helmet at the first place I can find because it is illegal to ride without a helmet here. It would be just my luck to get a ticket on top of needing to buy a new helmet. I hope not. I would load some pics but it is just too irritating to load them. When I find a faster connection I will try to come back and load some pics. I loaded two and gave up cause it is too frigging slow. These are during the rain and the next day when the rain stopped and the creek was going back down.