22nd Jan - Thames to Clevedon

Up about 7.30 and had a chilled few hours with Raewyn and John drinking coffee and eating a cooked breakfast. I left feeling nicely rested, feed and clean. It was very cloudy and windy in the morning but not raining as much as yesterday. It was a shame as I am sure that the area is really beautiful when the weather is not so terrible. It was pretty flat and easy going with a tail wind. I was averaging double the kms per hour as yesterday.


I stopped off around lunch time at a picnic spot over looking the bay to eat some of my left over food and have a break from riding and write my blog. Today I have about 125km to do but as it is easy going I thought I could potter a bit and still get to Auckland for about 6-7.

I am low on gas for my stove but I have not bought any more as I am flying in a few days. I was hoping that I had just enough to boil the water for a coffee and some instant noodles - not quite.... crunchy noodles and cold coffee for lunch :-) I am trying so hard to stick to my budget! It was very difficult passing little coffee shops on the way. I headed off once it started to rain, still with plenty of time to get to Auckland.

Not much further up the road I saw a sign which said "Here be Dragons" and then a little pottery shop full of Dragons. I had to stop and have a look inside. They where awesome. I loved the ones that have smoke coming out of their mouths when you burn insense inside them. There was one called "Hoff" which was great. I wish that I could have bought some but budget and weight would not allow. The older couple that own the shop were really lovely friendly people and invited me in for proper coffee and biscuits. They have a great view of the beach and the Corromandels in the distance. I stayed chatting for far too long and then headed off in the rain.

Their stuff is awesome:

http://www.freewebs.com/dragonsnestnz/

I biked for about another 2 hours in the rain and I was bored. It was the first time in my trip on the bike that I just really wanted to stop biking and get to where I was going to and get dry. The countryside was not very exciting. I only had about 35kms to go and was going to get to Auckland at dusk. Again I had let the day carry away with me and was going to get somewhere too late....I was planning on staying with some friends of the Samoans I had met just outside of Wellington.

I stopped off at a pub to use the toilets and got chatting with a guy (Pete) outside holding his son waiting for his wife (Lesely). It turned out that they had some friends inside the pub that live just behind the pub and they invited me to stay with their friends and then also to stay in Auckland over the next few days. The invite could not have come at a better time :-) I was really happy not to continue biking and even better was that I got to sit in a pub all evening with some awesome people and just be normal for 1 night. There was a welsh lady, her Kiwi husband Vaugh, their friend Jammel (a Kiwi nicknamed Jandel) and Brian from the US. Jammel and Brian are currently living and working in Aus but were visiting to make plans for their wedding in March which is taking place in NZ.

They very kindly bought me several glasses of wine which I drank on an empty stomach. They had all already eaten and so I decided to treat myself to my first pub meal of NZ. What a perfect place to choose to do it. I ordered the burger (recommended by the others) for £6 and what a burger it was :-) It was about 1 mile high and came with a massive plateful of chips.... happy girl. We went back to Vaugh and ? (please remind me :-( - so sorry it has slipped my mind!...I feel really bad!) and carried on drinking and playing cards. It was great fun.

It was really lovely to spend time with some people my own age just sitting in a pub and drinking and then going back to someones house and talking smut and rubbish. It made me miss all of my close buddies and doing normal things like bantering with people that you know very well. I did not feel like I had to be on my best behavior around them. If I was staying longer I really think they would be great friends to have. It was great to have some British humor.