DAY 13 –Nelson to Murchison

DAY 13 –Nelson to Murchison – 177km / 9:45 total / 8:09 Riding time /21.7 kph average

I “officially” started that Sunday at 12:30pm due to attending Stoke Baptist in the morning. It was nice to fellowship with other Christian believes whilst the church demographics was 75+. The folk were lovely and I walked away with a number of cash donations for the CAP fund.

The late starting meant I battling a strong headwind all the way to Wakefield 25K away which made progress slow. Finally at Wakefield I turned and headed into the hills to take on more logging gravel roads and climbed over the Dovedale summit and down into the beautiful Tadmoor valley. I passed Malcolm Johnstone (just realised now he is 62!) who was only going as far as Tapawera that day.

So far the wind was a strong head or sidewind so I stuck on the aerobars and pushed on limiting my food stops as I knew I was going to run out of light and arrive quite late at the Murch backpackers.

I got to the photo control point at the beautiful Lake Rotoroa just before dusk. I guess I thought I might have a quick 5 minutes quiet time at the lake but the mosquitoes had other ideas so I continued onto the Braeburn track which was another gravel road with a significant climb over a hill. I summited the top of the climb at dusk and then sat back and flew down the final 35k into Murchison taking just over an hour seeing only what my light showed me. There were plenty of darting bunny rabbits to get points on the way down. I arrive at the backpackers bang on 9:30pm which was the time I had told them I would be there. It just goes to show I can actually get a lot of distance covered off in a good time as long as I don’t stop for long!