About Detours

In 2002 at the age of 50 we decided that we needed to put some adventure into our lives. Time was running out and unless we put a plan into action we were going to miss out.

So the first adventure we embarked on was on water – initially in a tandem kayak and then we upgraded to a cruising launch. Neither of us had any boating background.

We spent many years  cruising around the coastline of northern New Zealand. It was a great time but as we started to find ourselves regularly venturing back to the same places we decided that it was time to branch out in our activities. Walking or hiking was added, then we rediscovered cycling, got wings and started to venture further afield.

After an 800km series of bike rides through Germany and France in 2013  we quit our full time jobs in June 2015 and spent the next six months on the road. More biking, walking and just discovering different places. We have now relocated to a smaller town and also have the time to enjoy other aspects of life including volunteering, particularly in the area of habitat restoration and Ruth is actively involved with Red Cross.

In 2017 we spent three months exploring many of the walking tracks and cycle ways here in New Zealand and in December 2017 we headed off on another visit to South East Asia with time being spent in Northern Thailand followed by a slow boat ride down the Mekong River into Laos before returning to finish our adventures in Cambodia that we last visited in 2015. Walking and cycling were again feature of our travels.

Upon our return to New Zealand we invested in two folding electric bikes. The original concept was to tour through Europe but as we started to appreciate the seriousness of the collapse of biodiversity and, climate change, we decided to cease long haul flying and limit other flights as much as we can. Our adventures in future were going to be domestically based.

We have so far undertaken two multi-day rides on our folders with the last on our folders being a 720km ride from Rotorua to Wellington in the North Island of New Zealand. In early 2020 we embarked on an EV road trip with quite a bit of cycling along the way, as a test of Cliff’s belief that he might try and ride from the top to the bottom of the country in spring 2020. Covid 19 cut short that trip and canned the spring 2020 idea. Cliff also decided that an electric folder was probably going to be a challenge and decided to revert to a ‘huff-n-puff” mountain bike. The adventure began in autumn 2021 and despite the best efforts of Covid to derail that trip, it was completed in February 2022 – the South Island was ridden in Nov/Dec 2021 and the rest of the North in Feb 2022. In Nov/Dec 2022 I returned to the South Island for another multi week adventure following the Sounds to Sounds route for 1,500 km through some pretty remote but beautiful country. 

I miss not having Ruth on my MTB adventures so after quite a bit of optimistic sales talk she has agreed to come out of retirement and take on a new role as “Stoker’ on an e-tandem bike. Hopefully I haven’t oversold this but the premise is that as a stoker on an e-bike the things that she likes the least are largely ticked off, such as: steering, changing gears and managing a heavy bike on her own. Time will tell. The new bike arrived just before Christmas 2023.  

We hope to keep our adventures rolling along as long as the bodies will comply and are currently focussed on the ‘mother of all adventures’ of riding the tandem 7,500km around New Zealand. To help motivate us we have decided to pedal for local charity The Bald Angels.

The blog name is Detours and while this was meant of the traveling variety, there are also detours off the main highway of life. Life is shorter than we think and we need to make the most of it now, tomorrow will one day not come along.

Cheers

Cliff & Ruth