After tramping around Queenstown & Lake Wakatipu on Wednesday, we decided to rent bikes on Thursday. Our big, audacious goal was to ride to Arrowtown. That goal was quickly squashed when the bike shop told us that this ride that we had in mind was a 64km round-trip, uphill ride. Not being deterred, we set off to ride the trail for a few hours & turn around at a set time.
The ride was great but clearly the bicycle muscles are different from the walking muscles. We had some downhill rides but plenty of uphill riding. Lesley did better than David on sustaining the uphill riding – maybe spinning works? The river was beautiful, the views of the Lake were always enjoyable. We never made it to the top of our interim stop, ironically called “Thompson’s Hill”. ( We were warned that this “hill” would be the most challenging part of our cycle.) We did ride about 29-30 miles on the dirt/gravel track, including a wrong turn that took us down another trail. We returned the bikes and were very tired, sore (hate those bicycle seats!) but enthused about what we did accomplish.
On Friday, we fly to Auckland for an overnight stay before flying to Sydney for 7 days. It is hard to believe that we only have about 5 weeks left on this first segment. We hope that snow starts to fall in Utah soon; as, we have been tantalized by the snow covered mountains in the South Island of New Zealand!
