Just checking in...

I have been making my way slowly (& uneventfully) up the east coast of the North Island and now find myself only about 3 hours from Auckland. I could ride up to the Coromandel peninsula but at this point I am quite uninterested in doing any more riding on this awkward and uncomfortable BMW. So I am just hanging around until I head back in a couple weeks. Nice place here in Katikati, but last couple days it has been raining. It is raining now, even though the forecast for this morning has a zero % probability - the usual. So rain is normal for fall but I am now looking forward to spring in Michigan - a wonderful time to be there and the forecast looks good for April, in contrast to last year. Oh, another forecast! Well see...

P.S.; as an afterthought, it occurred to me to find a picture of someone riding one of these things. There is no other place for my hands or my feet. Huh...

Hi, just got settled into a free city parking lot camping (with grassy areas & toilets) when I punched in the US news and was amazed to find New Zealand in the headlines! But as always, they only cover disasters and the mosque shootings are certainly that. No, I an nowhere near there now - I was there last month a couple times but as you may imagine, nowhere near a mosque.

Encountering this sign is not the best way to begin a day's ride, but I imagined it was aimed at the thrill seekers. This seemed to be the case as I had no trouble with the road itself, only a few impatient drivers which I mostly was able to ignore; they weren't as bad as some others I've seen.

Ready to do more travelling and looking at the area I will be headed toward. So I see a couple of unusually named places there. There have been many strange names for towns during this trip, mostly original Maori. However, sometimes this can lead to a bit of awkwardness...
Can't make this stuff up.



Then, the longest name for a place anywhere in the world - 85 letters! I discovered it's not a town, but the name of a hill & is said to translates roughly as "The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his kōauau (flute) to his loved one". Now normally anything over 1,000 ft is a mountain (this 1,001 ft) but here it's just a hill.

On the ferry back to the North Island. Not riding as much as I thought, but am definitely enjoying the warm weather and relaxation here. What I am NOT enjoying is the wind! I guess we are in the middle of the ocean on a sliver of land, where the wind can just breeze on through. Unless, of course, when it gets amplified by the mountains and propelled with even more ferocity along the roads between them - they call this the "wind tunnel" here. So whenever I have to endure wind, I think rain is better - when it's rain, I am quite sure high winds are preferable.

Kaikoura, on the north-east coast of the South Island has 3,552 people & there's nothing else around here. That's probably fewer humans than on that cruise ship anchored off-shore there. Not quite sure what it's doing there, but I am getting a free night of camping here on the rocks, courtesy of the local town council. Pretty windy but I have huge rocks anchoring the tent down since there's no putting in stakes here (picture from inside the tent). The only amenities are porta-loos - that's not bad for free...

P.S.; OK, I looked it up. I guess it's a regular stop for many cruise lines, including Holland America, Princess, etc. I hear a helicopter or two hovering and I guess there is whale-watching in the area, which had the big 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nov. 2016 that left 2 dead and 57 injured in Kaikuora alone. Christchurch got it bad, too. A few campgrounds I saw were still closed.

After getting back to the west coast, I remembered why this place is so beautiful. The weather west of the mountains is colder/wetter than the east, but I managed to be there when it was good. Then the forecast called for more rain (you will notice how very green it all is) so back to Christchurch!