Saturday, 1/2/2010
Another great day but we are exhausted and looking forward to a rest day tomorrow.

Tonight we are sitting in the hotel in Queenstown overlooking Lake Wakatipu. Although the ride was only 46 miles, it took us about 8 hours to get here because of stops for rest and pictures and lunch in Arrowtown which is an old gold mining/panning town. Just prior to entering Arrowtown we passed the beautiful Hayes Lake (see photo). We have now completed 5 days of riding and have covered 284 miles. Today’s ride was very scenic with lots of up and down hills through Kawarau River canyon (see photo), vineyards and mountain vistas. We saw lots of sheep, hang-gliders and bungy jumpers from a bridge over the Kawarau River, and a statue sitting in front of farm which Jeanette tried to imitate (see photo). Several of the riders were going to bungy jump but the wait was too long. As we entered the town of Queenstown and rode to the outskirts to our hotel, we found the the road leading to the hotel was 1.5 km uphill with a grade of 10 to 20%. Since we had made it to Queenstown and were exhausted, we opted to load our bike on the trailer and catch a ride with Darin instead of walking up the hill. Today’s weather had wind but the sky was a beautiful blue with no clouds.

Queenstown is noted for the most popular tourist city in the country. It sits on a beautiful lake, Lake Wakatipu, that is in the shape of an ‘S’. It has an interesting phenomenon about it in that it rises and falls 12 inches every 15 minutes and they don’t know why. We plan to explore tomorrow the reason for this action. Across the lake is a mountain range that rises right up from the waters edge, they are named the ‘The Remarkables’ (see photo).

Tomorrow is our day off and we plan to do some sightseeing in the area, right now we are scheduled to go to Milford Sound and we will let you google it to see what it offers. They have forecast rain so we will see what we can do. We are staying in a very nice hotel which has a living area with deck and a fabulous view, a kitchen, and separate bedroom. It is a great location to spend an extra night and recover from our rides.

To explain what our routine has been up to this time, it follows pretty much the same plan. We get up around 6 am and get all our gear together and repack our luggage. Around 6:45 am we take our luggage to the trailer to be loaded up for transport to the next location and if there will be no places to buy lunch for the day we will make a lunch to carry. We then meet for breakfast together and then start out on the road. Occasionally we may cycle with other tandem teams but often we are on our own. Several teams will usually stop for lunch together. We arrive in our destination location at different times and sometimes dinner is included where we all eat together or other times like tonight we just ate with 3 other couples.

Our two guides, Darin and Al, are both Kiwi’s and are great. They alternate each day with one driving the vehicle and the other riding their half-bike along the route with us. We kid them by saying one day their bikes will grow up to be tandems also. Tonight at dinner they said that they probably ride about 50% more than we do because they start after the last team has left and will ride up to the first team then back to the last team and do this throughout the day. The driver of the motor vehicle also is patrolling the road to support us.

They are both very experienced riders and we use them for guidance and instruction. After several days of riding we were all experiencing problems with our seats sitting in the saddles all day long. Al was asked what we could do to help our bottoms feel better and offered this Kiwi advice. In the morning you take a handful of gravel and stick it in your cycling shorts. You then start your ride and as early as mid-morning you can remove the gravel from your shorts and your bottom will feel much better. We have not tried it yet.

We have appreciated the comments from many of you who are cheering us on.