I had a weekend “owing” and Maaike was keen that I use it up before her latest round of study. I decided to do a trip which my friend Malc had done a while back, which was to bike out to Rangiora and back by the coast. Honestly, if I’d thought about biking out to Rangiora and back to Christchurch a few years ago, I’d have thought “how completely boring”, but, honestly, this was an excellent little adventure. While I totally love our little daughter, it’s also nice not to be woken up at 06:30 on the dot, to be able to have some completely alone time – it was very restorative!

I plotted the route out on plotaroute.com which was a very nice little interface to open street map. OSM has far better information about bike tracks etc, so, it was very handy to be able to use that site for making the trip up. Then I exported the GPX file and loaded it into OSMAND+ on the phone, and then I had my turn by turn directions for the trip. Super handy.

It was a little bit chilly on the Saturday. I was quite happy to get to lunch in Kaiapoi. I was going pretty light, so, I didn’t have much in the way of warm clothes (at least not for while biking). Anyway, I found the hand-dryers in the museum doubled quite well as clothes dryers ;) heh.

When I got to Rangiora, I stayed in a very nice room in an AirBnB, with a lovely retired couple. The place was spotless, the shower was hot (and very welcome), and they showed me their really pretty geode collection. Lovely. I went out for steak and a pint at the pub. It lashed rain while I was walking, and the extremely kind manager of the five stags offered to give me a lift home! Not sure if this is normal or not, but, it really was very kind (I walked anyway, because I’m silly ;)

Next day was the meat of the expedition. Out along the stop bank to Waikuku beach, then along the coast, detour back to Kaiapoi to cross the Waimakariri, then back along the coast down to New Brighton. Honestly, thoroughly excellent trip, can recommend.