Wanganui to Feilding

Day 16 - Saturday 13 March 2010

Dist: 78 km. Av. Speed: 24.2 km/hr. Cal: 1576. Ride Time: 3 hrs 12 min

We had to do a major sort-out of all our river camping gear and my riding gear this morning to make sure I didn’t leave anything behind or take along anything extra.

After getting it all organised we went and picked up my bike from the Avanti Plus store where they’d replaced the broken spoke, tuned the front derailleur and checked the headset. Nothing dramatic was wrong and it’s all going great now.

We cruised the main street looking for brunch and I picked up some good maps. The directions I’ve downloaded from AA Maps are pretty hard to follow in isolation but make good sense once you’re looking at them in conjunction with a decent scale map.

After a snack Shari and the boys drove off north back through Raetihi and eventually on to Waihi - while I pointed the bike east toward the flat country and with the following wind. My destination was Feilding via Marton. There was nothing special or spectacular about the day’s riding except that the tail wind made it easy to keep a good average speed with minimal effort and I made great time to Feilding despite a couple of surprisingly long and steepish inclines.

Feilding looks like a very nice wee rural New Zealand town. It looks a proud town and seems very well looked after.

It was good to get on the bike again and I’m looking forward to the next few days which are generally short and relatively flat - I’ll be keeping fingers crossed that the tail wind continues.