We have a friend that we met on North Island named Lauren, who lives in Darwin, Australia. She’s also riding the TA, but she is on a schedule and carrying less and stronger than us, meaning able to go faster than we can. She actually finished the TA today in Bluff! Brava, Lauren!!
One great thing about having her (as well as Todd and Royce) ahead of us is that we get good guidance about what was good or what things we should consider skipping. One such section to be skipped is called Big River – from Reefton to Ikamatua – which Lauren likened to the grueling Mangatapu, but worse. So, we are taking the road route to avoid Big River! 🙂 Lessons learned.
We left Reefton, meeting Darrel and Sebastian across the street from our hotel. Darrel and Sebastian are kind of an odd couple, who met at our campsite in Tapawera and are now traveling together. Darrel self-described as “undiagnosed on-the-spectrum, previously called someone with ants-in-the-pants” who has an abundance of energy and emits a constant stream of pithy conversation. Sebastian is a French Canadian from Quebec who speaks halting English and submits to Darrel’s flood of conversation without complaint. They seem to travel together fine. In Reefton, Darrel was waiting for an appointment to have his sutures removed from cuts received from a bike/car accident the previous week or so. He’s a tough cookie, with lots of bruises and cuts and sutures to show that cars always win in these events.
The Highway 7 route avoiding Big River is nothing special, but it’s also not horrible.
Coming into Greymouth, the wind was stronger and we were happy to be done. Even thought it was an “easy day”, we still rode 48 miles and climbed about 2,000 feet. Once we entered Greymouth, we decided to stay at a Backpackers called Noah’s Ark since Darrel and Sebastian were staying there, and we wanted to have dinner with them since we are pretty sure that we won’t see them again on this trip or maybe ever? Such is the pattern of meeting people on the road.
We all had dinner at Monteith’s Brewery, a few minutes walk from the Backpackers. Dinner and beer were good, and we chatted until most of the other diners were gone. Time for bed.
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