What’s been happening – May Update

With regard to the title of this post, if we are honest, not very much at all.

The GOTF decided to throw a sickie for a few weeks and the RA decided to get a little too enthusiastic in the gym and ended up on the bench for a week. The end result is that the bike(s) have been gathering the wrong type of dust. However, we seem to have recovered from those niggles and over the last week have at least got back into our normal exercise routines and even managed to take the tandem out for a couple of rides.

The most noticeable change from our previous outing on the tandem was the drop in air temperature. While the run of dry weather has continued, the temperatures, especially overnight, have tumbled and are currently of the mid-winter variety. But that has been ‘beneficial’ as they are now similar to those cooler summer days we should expect when we hit the deep south. Yesterday, we set out in brilliant sunshine for a 20km uphill segment. By the time we reached the top of the climb, a bank of cloud had rolled in effectively switching the heater off. We thought we had enough layers to keep us warm, but the downhill was decidedly chilly. Note to us: have an extra layer handy for those downhills, wind chill is a thing.

Our layoff did give us time to get a few bookings sorted for those locations where the options are extremely limited and for those that are popular with tourists. As we will be riding through those particular spots in summer, we are hoping that the weather will be more benign and will not cause too many disruptions to our schedule. But we have to accept that disruptions can come in many flavors, and it is wishful thinking to expect a trouble-free ride, especially given the length of it.

With winter nearly upon us, we start to think about other activities. Rod, who has volunteered to be acting RA for about 256km, has released his winter planting schedule for his many ‘rewilding’ projects around the Bay of Islands, so there will be plenty of ‘digging exercise’ to be had over the approaching cooler, wetter months. While the tandem team have our fingers crossed for mostly dry weather during our ride, Rod is looking to the skies, pleading for some consistent rainfall to prevent his schedule from being disrupted. To ensure the survival of young plants, the soil needs to be moist for those first critical months when they leave the nursery. Even plants can struggle outside their ‘comfort zone’. It has been disappointing to see too many of our previous years’ plants die during the current dry spell, especially some of the ‘older’ heritage trees such as Rimu and Kauri which we had expected to have been reasonably resilient by now. We have tried to limit the casualty rates by applying the equivalent of CPR – hand watering the trees. But with over 20,000 native trees now planted along our streamside 4km area, and only a small team of ‘tree medics’, we have to focus on the younger plantings which are the most vulnerable (just like young kids).

Which brings us to The Bald Angels, the charity that we are supporting during the ride ($985 raised during our Far North ride – thanks to all the donors). The Angel team continues to keep us posted on their activities to support vulnerable kids here in Te Tai Tokerau.

We were particularly impressed by the fact that Bald Angels focus on trying to give kids hope to dream of a better life. They do this by providing essential support to ensure that the most vulnerable children have the bare essentials to enable them to participate in things that most families take for granted such as bedding, warm clothing, coats, gumboots—just the basics, but they can help these children to participate in critical everyday activities such as going to school. Then they have their mentoring programme (KiwiMANA) which aims to help kids thrive as they get older. We think that this is particularly pertinent when our politicians are constantly focused on building bigger prisons. That approach suggests that building prisons at the ‘bottom of the cliff’ serves the community better than stopping youth from falling off the cliff in the first place. We applaud Bald Angels for endeavoring to give youth hope. As Bishop Desmond Tutu said: “We must stop pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in”.

We have included three recent social media posts by Bald Angels touching on these programs. The first is an outcome from the KiwiMANA program, the second is about the great response that they have got from North Shore Schools to their Coats for Kids campaign, and the third tells one of many great stories about the generosity of people – this time the Keep our Kids Warm campaign.

These positive stories help to keep us motivated about our ride, especially when we look out the window over winter and see the cold, horizontal rain and think, do we really want to ride in weather like this?

Don’t forget that you can help with our motivation by donating to Bald Angels via our Angel Tandem give-a-little page – all funds raised go directly to Bald Angels. If you have already donated, thank you, but don’t forget to tell friends and family about our adventure by sharing a link to this blog or to our social media pages.

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