The ‘devil is in the details’ (our Itinerary)

I am afraid that this post is probably a tad boring. There are no tales of eating gravel, tangling with logging trucks or unleashing the wrath of the Rear Admiral (RA). It is sadly a more mundane story of the ‘leg work’ required to try reduce the instances of sad tales that we may have to regale later. Eliminating such tales is impossible (good for the reader) but we do want to make sure that we are not amusing you with stories of running out of battery in the middle of nowhere or finding ourselves horribly lost or having to ride ‘like the wind’ in order to ensure that we don’t miss a boat connection. It’s called planning.

The GOTF (Grunt on the front) has a little experience in planning these longer distance rides having completed a few on my manual mountain bike over recent years. The Kennett brothers have done a lot of the leg work with regards to the routes although for our ride there are a few sections that do not figure in their publications. Apart from those few sections of ‘uncharted territory’, planning this trip has proved to be a little more challenging than past rides. For example:

• Riding solo on a manual bike gives you plenty of flexibility for your daily destinations. If you are set up for camping the world is pretty much your oyster and booking accommodation in advance is not really necessary. Makes life much simpler.
• Riding on an e-bike means that you need to aim for a reliable power source for charging the batteries otherwise the GOTF will be facing severe disciplinary action by the RA. That narrows down our accommodation options and bookings become essential in the more popular destinations over at least weekends and during holiday periods.
• The RA has put her foot down on daily distances which places further challenges around selecting potential overnight destinations – especially when there is a distinct lack of them in some of the more remote areas. She has the right attitude though, we are older and in no hurry – it is not a brevet for us. Fortunately, the range of our 1kw of power does mean that we can keep the RA happy(ish) by breaking a longer ride into “RA friendly’ segments’ and not need to charge the battery. The downside for the boss is that it probably means breaking out the tent and forgoing a shower, well at best a hot shower, on a few rides. Our stage one ride to Cape Reinga proved that we should good for at least 140-170km on a single charge depending on the terrain and weather conditions (cold weather can drop our range by as much as 20%) and, that an occasional night camping is just tolerable.
• Bookings are an unfriendly option when cycling in Aotearoa. The most popular description of Aotearoa is of course, ‘land of the long white cloud’. This gives the doddery duo a strong hint as to the weather variables that we may face during our adventure. Without doubt, we will face a few days where wind, rain, heat and potentially even snow (in the high country) will make riding marginal or even dangerous. If you are booked, you either have to ‘suck it up’ and deal with the elements or endue the hassle of attempting to rearrange your bookings, if that is possible at short notice. I am trying to minimise this by including a generous sprinkling of reserve (or rest) days which hopefully, at worst, mean that only a few days worth of bookings might be compromised. We are not too worried about our southbound journey which is outside peak visitor so we should be able to sort accommodation closer to the day, maybe excepting weekends and segments along popular bike trails or tourist traps Our ride north, particularly through Te Waipounamu, will be during the busier summer season and we will encounter the Tour Aotearoa brevet for a few days so bookings are probably going to be more essential. Hopefully, being mid-summer, the weather will be kinder.

Before we even headed off on our stage one ride around the Te Tai Tokerau I had put together a rough route that looked feasible. I had made some pretty arbitrary calls on what the possible daily destinations and distances may be. However, now armed with the learnings from that ride I have attempted to come up with a more ‘RA friendly’ itinerary that hopefully gives us a battery charge at the end of most days. There are a few key dates that are mostly considered ‘locked in’. Ferry crossings and our flights during our break between the end of the ride south and the return north to Kerikeri. Also, we are starting to get some interest from potential guest stokers (which means that the RA is stoked). But arranging to meet someone at particular location also locks you (and them) into a date. I suspect that despite all of the efforts, there will be more than a few ‘curved balls’ that get hurled at us. Best not to get too stressed about it and deal with each situation when and if they happen. You can view our itinerary by day & date here.

We don’t ‘wing it’ when it comes to determining how challenging (or easy) any ride may be. I have been using a planning App called Komoot for about six years and have found it an excellent option for assessing the challenge each ride presents.

Despite all of this invaluable information, there are still some days that you approach with a degree of nervousness, especially when you have long stretches through very remote countryside, often without any mobile phone coverage. We can download the Komoot maps so that our route progress is still available to us but, without the mobile coverage, those following our progress will simply see that we are stuck (supposedly somewhere near last cell tower we passed). To give us some additional comfort along these stretches we carry a satellite communicator (Zoleo). This allows us to share our location with selected people and acts as an EPIRB with the added advantage of allowing us to send and receive text messages.

A couple of other key bits of information that still need a bit of ‘leg work’ are; determining what our food / resupply options are along the ride and identifying potential bike maintenance locations. As with our last ride, there are a few instances where we will need to carry several days of food supplies as there are simply no shops, cafes or pubs on our route. It is important to know where that last opportunity to stock up is located. Also, on a ride this long we will need to carry out some planned maintenance on the bike and may find ourselves in need of some unplanned repairs. As we are riding an e-tandem we may need to either order specific parts to be delivered to a destination en route or phone ahead to a bikeshop to give them a heads-up on what work we need done and what the malfunctioning or broken parts are. We carry some critical spares and items that can hopefully be used to keep the bike in a rideable state should the worst case scenario happen.

Having worked out our ‘preferred’ overnight stops, the next task is to determine where we might park our head without having to empty the bank account.

Well that will keep me busy for a while so you will be spared any more ‘admin posts’.