Photo uploads to Flikr

Two more days of pictures and video have been uploaded.  These show our March 8th completion of the rail trail at Clyde, a few more miles of biking on the highway up the Clutha River, and farm stays on March 8th, followed by a set of the March 9th morning bike ride to Terras and the Pottery Shop.  From there we took the van to Wanaka airport where Trixie, Julian and Claira did their sky diving.  On the last set I've reversed the chronological sequence, putting them in the order in which you would view them as we progress through the day.  (The March 8th is in reverse order, as are all the previous.)  This seems to be the way Flikr intends that sets are organized, so I'll do that from now on.  Only 8 more days of photos to go!!

Picture Upload

I know, I know......the picture uploads are taking for-ev-er.  But the weather in Springfield is perfect, there are outside spring cleanup chores (including mowing) to do while the weather is cooperating, meetings with tax guy, etc. etc.  But I did wade through our second day on the rail trail pictures and managed to get a few of them uploaded and described.  Look for March 7th set at Flikr.  I'm hoping to get it all finished before dementia sets in!  Jim

Picture Upload for March 6, 2012

Just a note to whomever has been following this blog that I've uploaded pictures from March 6th.  This was a van-train-van-bike day.  Beautiful weather, and a great ride on both the railroad and the Otago Rail Trail.  As in the case of all first day rides, the part of the anatomy in contact with the saddle gets mighty sore!  Especially in this case as the rail trail is more bumpy than what we normally have here in the states.  A LOT more bumpy.  In fact, I wore out a pair of bike gloves this first day!!  That may have been partly due to the ancient age of the gloves, however.  But regardless, it was more than worth it.  The broad vistas, the tunnels, the scenery near the trail, and the sharing of the adventure with friends and family are indelibly printed in my mind.  Hard to beat it, but this is just the first day of riding.  More is to come, and each one is different and sometimes more exciting than the one before.
I want to give credit again to Pat and Simon for many of these pictures that I just uploaded.  We all took pictures throughout the day, and often the only way I can tell who took them was by the file number. I do appreciate it!  Again, the link to the pictures is:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tandemcouple   Jim

URL to Flikr pictures

Hi "everyone"....OK, so one or two..... who have been eagerly awaiting more pictures of our trip.  Here is the first upload of our days in and around Dunedin.  I can see this is going to be a project that will take some time, so I'll be adding to the pictures as I can get them organized with some description of where we were and what we were doing.  Those of us who shared pictures with one another didn't all have the same date and time on our cameras (after crossing the international date line I'm not sure Einstein could have figured out what time it was!), so the picture file is somewhat jumbled up and takes time to un-jumble into a reasonable sequence of events.  You might check in every few days to see how well I'm accomplishing the task.  I'll stay at it!!  The URL is http://www.flickr.com/photos/tandemcouple/  Jim

Home Sweet Home

Yes, this is being written from home, after about 26 hours of being in the air and waiting at airport gates for connecting flights in Los Angeles and Denver.  We're a bit jet lagged and blowing our noses from colds we picked up along the way, but we'll get over that soon, no doubt.  We and the Wingets said a hurried goodbye to one another in the terminal transfer bus in LAX as they headed for their American Airlines flight to Dulles and Susan and I to our Frontier flights to Denver and on to Omaha.

I think Susan and I along with Scott, Rebecca, Claira and Lillian will look back on this New Zealand bike tour in future years with much fondness for the time and adventures we shared with each other and our tour leader friends, Simon, Jessica, Julian, and Paula, and our new fellow bikers, Pat and Trixie.  We're very thankful there were no accidents or even close calls in all our many miles of travel.  New Zealanders were invariably friendly and gave us plenty of room as they passed us on their narrow roads.  It's hard to be grouchy when you are as fun loving as the people of New Zealand seem to be.

Here is a shot that Simon took of the group (excepting himself, of course, and Paula, who was to meet up with us after the picture was taken).  We'll get them recorded for posterity when I get through wading through a couple thousand pictures and videos that we all took and shared with one another on the last day in Oxford.  I've just started a new Flikr account and will be uploading some of those in the coming days (including live video of Claira jumping out of an airplane) so check this blog in a couple days to get the URL.

Jessica, Claira, Lillian, Susan, Rebecca, Jim, Scott, Pat, Trixie, Julian near Brunner, NZ on our last day of biking.

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Saturday at Christchurch

It’s Saturday so we must be in Christchurch.  In fact, out luggage has been checked,  boarding passes in hand and we’re all set for departure to Auckland in a couple hours.  The Wingets are visiting the Antarctic Center for quick look while Susan and I wait.

Getting on line has been a problem the last couple of nights, so no way to bring you up to date on our adventures since Okarito Lagoon.  We woke up to rain Thursday morning, and the report was that it was raining all the way to Hokatika.  No one in the group was interested in biking in such conditions, so we loaded up the van and drove all the way, stopping a couple times for a bathroom breaks and snacks.  Unfortunately, the clouds obscured the snow capped peaks that otherwise would have been visible for much of the route.

We arrived at Hokatika in the early afternoon, had lunch, and everyone scattered out to check out the town.  It’s the largest town on the New Zealand west coast, and was the destination of the gold miners back in the 1800s.  Today it is known for its greenstone (jade) jewelry, usually made in Maori symbols of life, togetherness, fish hooks, etc.  We were warned you have to be careful or you might be buying something made in China.  I was very careful and didn't buy a thing!

The clouds started breaking up soon after we arrived at our beachfront hotel, so Claira, Lillian and I took a stroll on the beach, while the others poked around town.

Dinner was on our own, but most of us walked to an Indian restaurant a few blocks from the hotel.  The band that had entertained us in Okarita was playing in a nearby theater, and Simon and Pat went to see that, reporting the next morning that the audience numbered about 100.  The rest of us went back to the hotel, and I spent a half hour trying to connect to the internet.  No luck.  Some places here do not like Apple computers.

Friday (yesterday) dawned bright and clear, and we left Hokatika in the van for Greymouth.  The bikes were unloaded next to a cemetery where those who had died in a coal mine disaster back in the 1890s were buried.  The road and weather was perfect for biking, and everyone rode.  It was a lightly traveled road, mostly flat, but a couple challenging hills.  It wandered along a valley with high mountains on either side.  Thirty four miles later we came to Jackson Tavern and the end of our biking on this tour.  We had lunch at the tavern, and walked down to the railroad tracks to await the train.  Simon and Jess stayed in the van with our luggage while the rest of us rode the train up to Arthur Pass where the train made a 15 minute rest stop before proceeding on to Springfield, NZ.  We got off the train at that point, and the van and Paula arrived just a few minutes later to shuttle us the remaining distance to Oxford.

A one hour shuttle ride took us to the small, quiet town of Oxford and our last night’s stay.  Our final dinner together was at a nearby restaurant.

We said goodbye to Trixie and Paula as we left for the airport this morning.  There was a brief stop at a marino wool outlet, and then arrived at the airport where we said our goodbyes to the rest of the group.  We have a stop in Auckland, then the long haul flight to Los Angeles.  Will work on uploading some pictures when time allows.  We are now at the gate and should be boarding in a few minutes.  This report hasn't been anything exciting, but fills in the blanks of our past two days.    Jim

Thurs AM in Okarito

It’s Wednesday afternoon and we’ve just returned from the town of Franz Josef where we had lunch, and attempted to get a helicopter ride to the top of the glacier.  No such luck as the clouds around the mountains were too low for the helicopters to operate.  Our back-up plan was to have Simon lead us on a hike up the valley floor towards the foot of the glacier, and that’s what we did.  I should say several of us did.  The others wandered around the village, or, in the case of Claira and Lillian, took a long soak in the hot springs at the north end of town.  Alas, there is was no quilt store in Franz.  Looks like I finally have a few minutes to write, although I’m doing this on a Word program off line, and not sure when I’ll get to paste it into a blogspot posting. [Got on line this Thursday morning] The little café  here in Okarito where I wrote earlier today has Wi-Fi, but it apparently doesn’t like MacBook Air computers.  It repeatedly rejected the valid password before accepting it on a last try.  A little later it again wouldn’t take it.  Someone said that the router had problems with the MacAit.  Oh well.

I think my last full-length posting was after our beach walk at Wilderness Lodge on Monday.  After we returned from that we had a late lunch at the Lodge, cleaned ourselves up, and took kayaks up the Moeraki River to the Lake.  Everyone but Rebecca and Susan, that is.  They caught up on the washing and drying.  It was a lot of fun, seeing Harry (or possibly Harriet), the White Heron who has claimed the territory around the lodge, and some black swans. 

Later in the afternoon Scott and I took a 45 minute nature walk led by Nikki, one of the staff naturalists.   While she was doing that the girls did the eel feeding walk, and it’s been reported that Lillian was able to actually “pet” one of the eels when it came out of the water to feed.  Hmmmm…..not too sure about that kid! 

Just before dinner, while we were all sitting in the lounge, Gerry came in and gave a talk on the history of the Lodge, and early events along the beach where we had walked that morning.  Regarding the latter he opened a book and read the journal of a seaman, who, along with 4 others were on that very beach (in fact in a cave that we saw) to harvest the fur seals.  They were attacked by the Maori, and 3 of them killed (and probably eaten, as the Maori were cannibals).  The two survivors managed to escape in their boat, and rowed some 200 miles to safety.  Gerry said it was unusual for sealers to be literate, and fortunate that one of the survivor’s journal has made it to the history books.  Dinner that evening was, again, at the Lodge.  (There really aren’t any other options.)  The Backroads Company also had a group of 7 staying there.

Yesterday (Tuesday) morning we got on the bikes and headed North on Hwy 6.  It was quite chilly--definitely in the low to mid 30s, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and when we finally broke out of a long valley into the sunshine it warmed up to “just right” temperatures.  Pat, the star athlete in the group, headed out to do the whole 72 miles, the final 14 miles of which are called the Triple Bypass, a winding, steep, narrow road with over 3 major climbs.  (Katie, if you are reading this, I bet you would have been with her!)  Pat is an (almost) 57 year old Wonder Woman on a bike.  She handles the flats and downhill’s at a fast clip, then, it seems to me, speeds up when she heads uphill. Probably not, but she doesn’t attack a hill, she eats it alive.  Lillian did a few miles on her single bike.  Scott and Claira rode together and made the 58 miles to Franz Josef.  I rode along with Rebecca, Trixie, and Simon about 40 miles, then, along with Trixie, decided to take the van.  Rebecca and Simon continued on to Franz, making the 58 miles.   Regardless of how you travel that stretch of road it is beautiful.  As you get close to Fox Glacier you can see the snow covered peaks of the Southern Alps.  In other places you are along the beach with great views of the rain forest coming down to the shore. 

As I wrote earlier this morning, Paula and Swade had prepared a very delicious dinner of barbecue chicken, venison and pork sausages.  Then there was the walk across the road to the concert in a room about the size of an average living room.  Fiona, on the violin, was the “front” person, and just full of energy and talent.  The first row where some of our group were sitting were close enough that Fiona said she hoped she didn’t step on their feet.   Following the concert, most of us returned to our cabin, but Scott, Claira, and Lillian went back to Paula and Swade’s place to hang out with the musicians.

A bike is a great—if not the best—way to see New Zealand.  Simon, Jess, Paula and Julian have done a super job of putting this tour together and supporting it all the way.  Simon led tours here for several years, so is very familiar with the attractions and best places to eat and stay.  Paula also led bike tours here for a number of years, and was an important resource in planning the tour.  This is actually the inaugural bike tour of their new company “Great Bike Tours”.  For those who are interested you can Google their website.  Simon says he’s working on putting something together for South Africa next year.

We’re spread out in different homes here in Okarito, right in the area where Abel Tasman, the Dutch navigator, became the first European to sail these shores in 1642.  Captain Cook came much later, then the whalers and the seal hunters.  Tonight we’re all getting together at the Snyder/Winget’s spacious 3 bedroom cabin to eat the takeout that we got in town.  Tomorrow it will be back on the bikes to Hokitika, the jade center of New Zealand.  The following day we head back towards the east coast for the final night at Oxford, a suburb of Christchurch.  Sad to say, this tour is winding down.

Thurs AM Footnote:  It's a wet morning, and looks like we'll be riding the van to Okarito.  Jim