We’re heading off on a real “bikepacking” adventure, of the sort we’ve rarely (if ever!) done. The Molesworth Muster Trail is a 125-mile mostly-gravel route from Blenheim to Hanmer Springs, through the epic dry valleys of the Awatere and Acheron rivers and up over the high passes that divide them. I had originally set aside… Read more…

3:45am, the alarm goes off and we are up and moving. 4:45am, the motorized sliding door in the lobby of the apartment block opens on its strange delay, and we roll our loaded bikes out into pre-dawn Wellington. A worker inside the softly-glowing corner coffee shop, prepping for the morning, reminds us that we have… Read more…

Christmas to the New Year The day after Christmas, we took a walk to nearby Mount Victoria. There are steep hills all around Wellington, which keep the city compact from both a population-density perspective, and from a distance-to-nature perspective. It’s an easy walk from even the heart-of-downtown where we’re staying, to forest land so awe-inspiring… Read more…

The Capital Connection train to Wellington has only one run, departing at 6:15am. That meant we were awake and packed and out of our AirBNB far earlier than we usually are, but we figured that early departure hid an advantage: if we somehow failed to get on the Capital Connection, at least we could then… Read more…

Today we were continuing south and east to Palmerston North, New Zealand’s 7th-largest metropolitan area. The elderly lady running the Marton Motel warned about all the trucks on the road going that way (“they do it to avoid the weigh station on the highway!”), and I think my routing was already doing its best to… Read more…

I told Rett that we can subtract 200 feet from the day’s climbing (as calculated by RideWithGPS), but didn’t tell her why. When I initially looked at the cliff-steep jump in the elevation profile on the way out of Whanganui, I loved the surprise of learning how we would avoid riding it, and I wanted… Read more…