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!
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