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Our little railroad car was quite comfortable and the kitchenette made making coffee and breakfast much easier. We packed up and headed back into town as there is a hardware store that is open on Sunday and I needed a couple of metric screws to attach Dana’s third water bottle cage. Very windy today and my bike blew over while I was working on Dana’s. We’re heading into that SE wind today heading south on RT 1.
RT 1 is the major highway along the East coast of the South Island. Fortunately, it was a Sunday and it wasn’t very busy. We made our way to Blenheim and stopped for a wine tasting at the “Small Town Winery,” and had some lunch. We were on “The Whale Trail,” for part of our ride. The Whale Trail is a project to create a trail from Picton to Christchurch, but it’s only partially done and ended soon after we left Blenheim. Quite a lot of climbing and while the shoulder was good in most places, it disappeared at 90 degree left bends climbing over our biggest mountain of the day. At the top of the climb, Alex pulled over his pickup and waited for me and told me there was a trail we could have taken and to be careful on the road as a cyclist was killed a couple weeks before. I thanked him for that info, but it really didn’t matter any more because the trail was miles away and I was headed down the other side of the mountain. Dana was, of course, way ahead of me and I caught up to her just as we were turning off the highway to head to Marfells beach campground.
The ride to the campground passed salt processing ponds on our left and pine nut plantations on our right. Almost no traffic and though our maps showed the road as gravel, it was paved almost all the way to the campground. The campground itself was very crowded, but we made our online reservation and proceeded to find a very nice Dana ambiance approved spot overlooking the beach. We took a walk around the campground and struck up conversations with a couple of the other campers. It was a good and quiet spot and we headed in for a nice sleep and set our watch alarms to watch the sunrise at 6:30 am.
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