The adventure begins... Day 1 of Tour Aotearoa

And we're off!
Here is a video blog from the first day of riding on the tour.

Training in Tasmania...

It's the final countdown!

Having spent an awesome 4 weeks in Tassie, catching up with family and friends, and doing some great training rides, we're now back home pedalling some of our favourite routes. Only this time we're loaded up with all our bike packing gear. The packing of the bike gear seems to take us as long as the training ride itself! Tent, sleeping mat, stove, clothes, some food, electrolytes, snacks, first aid kit for ourselves as well as for our bike - the list goes on... and yet we're trying to stay under 12kilo!! 🙄

In Tassie we had some great rides, combined with a little cross training of tramps/bush-walks in the Pelion Plains to climb Mt Ossa (Tasmania's highest mountain), and the Walls of Jerusalem.
We rode to the family shack in Orford on the East Coast, around South Arm, south of Hobart from beaches to foothills, on lots of tracks in the Derby mountain bike mecca of the North East, and up kunanyi/Mt Wellington. Check out some of the holiday snaps below...

Wow! Riding 3000km in 30 days sounds like mission impossible. We've never ridden more than 100km in a day before yet will have to back it up day after day for up to 30 days!

But we're not foolhardy (or are we?). We've been training hard through 2019. Our training goal has been simple - ride more kilometres each month than the one before.

We are truly blessed in Wellington to have some great options for long rides that mostly avoid nasty encounters with traffic. Some of our favourites are:

• Riding "around the bays" of Wellington's south coast
• A lap around Mt Kaukau into the very remote feeling Ohariu Valley and Makara
• Up and down the Hutt River valley, which has bike paths on both sides of the river for much of it's length
• Around the harbour to the lighthouses at the entrance to Wellington Harbour, and then back home via Wainuiomata
• Following cycle trails north from Tawa to Peka Peka
• The Remutaka Trail loop (a multi-day adventure)

Here is a map of some of the delightful (and not so delightful) riding routes we've discovered this year.