We’ve moved to four different places over the last eight days, but thanks to two different trains, or simply short hops, we haven’t done a bike ride longer than 15 miles over those eight days. Today’s 42 miles would be nearly twice the 8-day total, and our longest distance since we descended into Christchurch three… Read more…

Day 3 Our original plan for today was to do an unloaded out-and-back ride to a big waterfall, with stops at a natural bridge and a free-access cave along the way. But our rescheduled Blackwater Rafting trip, though late in the day, is probably not late enough for us to comfortably do the ride, and… Read more…

Day 2 Today is our Waitomo Caves main event: Blackwater Rafting! That’s the clever branding invented by some nuts who, a couple decades ago, decided to start taking tourists on trips through the caves where you jump off underground waterfalls and float down a hidden river on an inner tube with a ceiling of glowworms… Read more…

Friday morning traffic on the two highways (SH3 and SH39) through Otorohanga was much busier than we had seen a couple days earlier, proving that the four-day school holiday around Easter turns it into a big travel weekend (the NZ Transport Agency even published traffic-backup predictions for the weekend like it did for the Christmas/New… Read more…

As we wheeled our bikes out to the street in the darkness, our AirBNB hosts continued their above-and-beyond by coming outside from their warm glowing house to give us more fresh-baked sweets, and a bag of pineapple chunks (and an offer to keep an eye on our bikes while we ran back to grab our… Read more…

It’s Monday, so unlike the once-a-day train we had to catch on the Wairarapa Line on Saturday, the Kapiti Line has trains running every 20 minutes even in the middle of the day. Not bad service for a suburb an hour outside of Wellington (buses extend MetLink’s reach even more-impressively, we’d seen them go by… Read more…