On the road again, and again,and...

The amount of ground I've covered in the last four days has been pretty major, and tiring. After farewelling the staff and menagerie of the Blackball Hilton on Saturday morning, I headed back north towards Nelson, having a couple of German hitchikers for company. I met up with Ross, A-dub and Chris and Tristan, who had just finished the Christchurch-Nelson road race, which started at midnight on Friday and finished 400km and 13-odd hours later. Chris had taken out the solo category in a new record, and Tristan was part of the winning tandem team (actually they were on a 3-man machine...a trandem?). After a feed and a couple of brews, Ross and I headed into town to book the ferry for Sunday. The main street was packed and going off to a freestyle motocross exhibition, with flames and babes and all sorts of extreme shit. I've seen that stuff on TV quite a lot, but in the flesh it's pretty damn impressive. After our dose of backflips and whips, we got the Ferrari booked in (it's now a Ferrari after we decided that Ford just wasn't going to impress anyone). We weren't scheduled to leave until 7pm on Sunday, so a final ride in Nelson was organised, with a tired and sore Tristan showing us a nice switchback singletrack, after the obligatory long-ish dirt road climb of course. Aaron had done a 40k race, and we saw him at the end, 5th outright on his singlespeed, nice going A-dub!Ross managed to lose his glasses on the way down the singletrack, and when he went back and found them, they had been run over and remodelled by some guy on a Stumpy. Then it was back into the Ferrari and the drive to Picton, onto the ferry and arriving at Wellington about 10.30. Next morning we haeaded to the Kirkcaldie's house to drop off Rad's bike case, then to Val and Lindsay's to pick up my replacement AA card and a chat. That's Automobile Association, not Alcoholics Anon. Then, guess what, more driving! Another 6 hours to Taupo, including a sleep break when I was feeling the pinch a bit. We got to Taupo about 6, booked into the half price resort again (same room as me and Christian had!) and jumped on the bikes for a cob-web blow-out around the Huka Falls and down to the damn. I remembered from when me and Kman rode there that a local told me there was a track around the other side back to where the resort is. It started out a little overgrown, and soon deteriorated into a blackberry thorn-riddled-use-the-bike-as-a-machete slog fest. We jumped a fence halfway along and rode through someones paddock, with me getting zapped by an electric fence for good measure. Took my mind off the scratches. But we made it back, not exactly unscathed, and had a laugh about it over a beer. Today we headed up to the awesome Craters of the Moon trails, and rode 30km of sweet singletrack, no blackberries. I was riding about 3/4 pace, and Ross was probably 1/8th, not even breathing up the climbs, or sweating, while I was a drenched, panting mess. Lucky I got him on his down phase of training! We had a great ride though, both agreeing that the flow is so much better than in the South. We are doing the Karapoti Classic on Saturday, and I'm sure there'll be a lot bigger gap between us then. Should be fun. Tomorrow we hit Rotorua, more flow to go...