DeeKnow’s Grotto

On Friday night I pleaded successfully with Kym to borrow her car, loaded it up with my Mountain bike and associated paraphenalia, and early Saturday morning (well 8am is early for me) headed off to fuel up and drive out to the west coast for an all-day ride with friends from work.

When New Zealanders say they're off to the West coast they normally mean a quick half-hour drive on a nicely sealed road from one point in our relatively narrow nation to a slighly more westerly point. You're never really very far from either coast really.

The West Coast we were off to for the weekend however was due west of Ngaruawhahia to Te Akau, via Waingaro. The 1st half-hour is on a windy sealed road and the next 40mins or so is on wild twisty gravel unsealed 4WD nirvana kinda roads. Lots of single lane stuff and plenty of hair-rasing opposing traffic encounters along the way.

It was a GREAT drive there, Kym's car handled the roads well (although I didnt tell her that), and the journey made me realise you dont need an expensive car to have fun on a quiet road. Arriving at Skinny-Pete's hideaway batch I unpacked the bike, did some last minute maintenance (as per usual) and we were shortly on our way off down the road in a small cloud of dust.

It was a wicked ride, at 52 kms of gravel road it was kinda longish for an unfit bastard like me (took us about 3.5hrs) but we had some great views, got to laugh at each other losing it in the gravel numerous times, gave the lungs and legs a bloody good workout, and made for some very grateful beer drinking by the time we got back to the batch.

Pete's place was wicked. Basically a classic kiwi-batch on stilts in the bush if you can imagine such a thing. Reasonable sized kitched with an on-demand gas-fired water heater, two small bedrooms bolted on next door, a cave-creek like platform balcony and an outhouse and shower loosley attached to the outside of one end of the house. Classic kiwi build-it-yourself kinda place, brilliant.

The cool thing for me too about finally checking out Te Akau was that my mum grew up out there as a kid when the family worked on the farm. Jeeze it musta felt pretty remote back then, even Waignaro woulda been a reasonable effort to get to.

8:33:35 AM