Day 7

A beautiful morning in Geraldine for the start of our ride to Christchurch. The Stewart and Millar families joined us for this leg along with Alan from the previous day. Chris started off and tagged Jake further down the road.

Our first stop was Mayfield where we had coffee and polished off a banana cake supplied that morning by Alex & Anne.

Alan rode a further 13 km up from Mayfield and headed back home. Many thanks to him again for sharing the front with Chris and Jake. Nick and I sat in the slipstream for as long as we could.

We met up with Rich MacIntosh about 12 km from Raikia. He rode down from Christchurch to meet us. He had a nice tail wind down but had to turn around in to a ‘stiff’ nor east wind for the trip back. We had a quick stop at Rakaia and worked out a strategy to get across the long bridge. Lynelle took the lead in our car while Serra was behind us in the truck. No one passed us and we had a large queue by the time we hit the other end. I hope no children decided to hold their breath in the cars behind us!

The wind got quite strong and it was single file up to Burnham before we could get off a ‘very busy’ highway 1.

At one stage Nick clipped Jakes back tyre which bought him down on the tarmac! Thankfully he fell the right way and no damage was done to him or the bike. It was a relief to get to Burnham and on to some less congested roads through to Christchurch.

We arrived at 130 Reynolds Ave (our destination) just after 5 pm to finish the day! We were welcomed in by Mumra and Grandy (Bob and Lena), Nancy and Brian and Valda.

The ride was 150 km but Rich ended up doing 161 km as he didn’t quite work out the halfway point.

It’s nice to be in Christchurch and a couple of rest days in front of us before we push on to Nelson.

Signing off, Denis