Going for a slightly different format today… Designed for all those people that are suffering deep anguish that they’ve been trudging through a decidedly average NZ summer to date, issuing copious warnings about what a turd awaited any Nomad tour, only to have me arrive and snort up three days of epic sunshine faster than a group of Forex Traders can make bags of white powder disappear.
I don’t have a lot of story in todays post, but as you’ll see I’ve let the pics do the heavy lifting, plus this simple equation does the rest really:
No Power Meter + No training plan + Awesome weather = Why its easy to love cycling
And without further delay, let the #roadporn get underway…
Wellington… On a GOOD day etc
Second ride back on the Road2Recovery and when the Welly weather is like this, the only thing that could have possibly been on the menu was a classic Bays spin. If you’ve never been to Wellington, don’t be fooled by these pics, this shit is rarer than honest people come bonus allocation time at an Investment Bank. And to think, this was early before it REALLY got nice:
“If I moved back it would be like this all the time right?”
It wasn’t just the weather turning heads though, someone took the opportunity to pop his Rapha cherry as well, AT rolling out in this little gift from Dirty Santa and once again proving the hypothesis that a Rapha jersey instantly lets your inner Zoolander out to rage on a photo shoot… He took to it like a drunk person to the chocolate fondue fountain at a work function:
A delicious obsession starts with a single jersey…
Lyall Bay – Not so great for surfing, excellent for gimp spinning
Te Horo back roads
Leaving Welly behind on the NZ Summer Lovin tour and it was back up the Coast to familiar territory. Yeah, been here before. Interestingly I’ve ridden around these roads for over 25 years now, on all sorts of bikes, but I don’t think I appreciated these quiet and oddly lumpy little rural back blocks as much as I did today, obviously aided by my “Holy fuck I can ride a bike again!” euphoria that makes me sound like a bit of a cheese dick right now. Don’t worry, it’ll wear off at some stage. The weather probably helped…
Hmmm… Only 25 years difference between when I first rode down here and today… Fart noise
Whilst the Mountain Biking world is slapping itself on the back thanks to the proliferation of ENDURO, the cupboard is a little bare for Road Marketing teams, so their recent buzz has been trying to convince us that we need to ride our road bikes on gravel roads and guess what, we even need a ‘Gravel Road Bike’ to do so… Stunningly awful. Cool in the Strade Bianche when PRO’s do it, not so much when you’re a nervous unfit mofo…
AKA: The turn around point
Enough talk… I’m going to let the lushness do the business for me here as opposed to me dribbling on about a rather slow early morning road ride. This is basically Instagram on EPO:
The old classic Totara tunnel… Shit never gets old
Just any excuse to stop really
Almost bordering on artisanal
The road that cars forgot
Quintessential road porn right here…
And now, back to the ENDURO diet… Cliche yes, points off for taking a photo of food (fucking terrible), but I needed something to balance out the artistic nature of this post to be fair…
My stomach started to pen the “Fuck you” letter straight away
Did I just take a whole lot of random photos of roads and pass it off as a post with no particular story line? YUP… Some times we just have to stop talking and enjoy the view…
Massive thanks to our Dirty Welly Affiliate for the hosting and domestique services – CHUR Bro.
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