To read from the beginning, click here.
Another good night’s sleep and we got up to bid Theresa adieu as she had to leave to visit a sick friend. Darren fixed up breakfast and we got everything together and bid him goodbye, too carrying a couple of apples and a banana courtesy of Darren. We stopped in “downtown” Te Awamutu to visit the hardware store and get some gas for our camp stove as we hadn’t confirmed a stay that night and our backup was to camp at Lake Ngaroto. No gas at the store!
After a quick stop at the supermarket, we headed out towards Ngaroto. Darren had given us a nice back-roads route, that avoided the highways and the city of Hamilton (fastest growing population center in NZ). As we kept striking out on finding gas in the little towns, we decided to take the Te Awa bike trail into Hamilton — there were a number of outdoors/hardware stores there and also bike shops as Papa Hobo as developed some noises I need to have checked out.
The Te Awa trail was lovely. Right along the river, fully paved, and mostly easy grades. Along the way, we heard from our Warmshowers host, Colin, in Te Amawatu, and decided to nix the search for gas as Colin’s profile noted that gas was available in his town. A quick check of the bike shops in Hamilton showed that they were closed or closing soon, so I had to put that off, too. I re-routed us to Colin’s place and we were on our way again.
The ride was pleasant, but our little detour to Hamilton added about 10 miles to the day. Add on an extra 5 miles that my quick-routing added, and we ended up with 62 for the day.
We surprised Colin in his yard — he was expecting us Monday (it was Sunday) — a miscommunication on my part. He shifted gears very quickly and showed us our room, and we took showers while he cleaned up, too. He had built the house — all brick and massive wood timbers and lots of glass (glass was his profession), the rear adjoining a farm and cow field. He showed Dana his garden and they picked fresh veggies and avocados for a salad that Dana was going to make. While they were getting supper ready, I worked on the last blog post as I’m already a couple of days behind.
Colin made a seafood soup, and heated up a couple of meat pies for me, Dana cooked some pasta and we ate talked for hours, completely forgetting the fire Colin had started outside (tho I did pop out a couple of times while the cooking was going on to take in it’s warmth. When Colin shared that he was managing the care for his brother in Perth, Australia, he and Dana connected with a long conversation about his brother and her late father’s experiences with Parkinson’s and Parkinson’s Dementia, and their struggles with care giving, care givers, how much harder for Colin doing it over the phone and an occasional visit. An emotional but nice evening and we all headed to bed.
Leave a Reply