We tried to avoid the closed roads, due to ‘Ironman’ but this was not entirely possible and as a result we got mixed up with the bike riders for about half a mile before we got to the clear roads.
For the first part of the journey the roads were quite straight and few hills and not really much of interest however after about 50 miles we were back to Mountains, Lakes, Rivers, Valleys, Gorges and twisty windy roads going up and down etc. This road is used a lot by the ‘Testosterone’ charged kids with their lowered saloon cars to see how brave and fast they can go without causing an accident.
Picture below is Old car
touring Napier
It’s quite funny really when you see these young men in their beaten up old cars, usually painted white, with lowered suspensions, Magnesium Alloy wheels, huge exhaust tail pipes on their vehicles. In some towns they have built large humps in the road to slow down the traffic and all you can hear is a booming Rap sound followed by slowing engine and then scrapes of metal on concrete as the front of the cars, followed by the under car exhaust pipe and finally the large tail pipe scrapes along the ground, then off
they go with a large exhaust note until they reach the next hump 50 yards down the road.
Anyway, back to the journey. We had originally tried to book in to Napier for a night or two only to find that there was a music festival on with Tom Jones and Rod Stewart and other famous names appearing. As neither Tom nor Rod invited us to their place we spent a couple of hours walking around this old town.
Like the Names
Napier was hit by a major earthquake in 1931 which virtually wrecked the town but with strong spirit they set about replacing all the old buildings with new ones in the ‘Art Deco’ style which was popular at the time. Some of the buildings are really quite beautiful but again they have allowed the power of store advertising to take away from how nice they look.
This place was very busy indeed with people there for the music festival. There was also a small farmers market so we decided to take a look and bought a couple of steaks for dinner, hope they are OK.
We were just about to get some sausages as well when Noel noticed that his credit cards were not in his wallet, PANIC, where had he lost them? Not in the market or at the coffee shop so we almost ran back to the car. They had dropped out of his wallet into the centre armrest in the front where he normally drops his wallet instead of sitting on it, what a relief!!
Then it started to rain and it was time for us to leave and drive the next three and half hours up the coast to Gisborne.
The road journey along the coast was again through great scenery and we stopped in a little town called Wairoa for a cup of tea and it was mostly closed apart from one café, quite unusual.
We arrived in Gisborne at about 5.30 pm , the heart of wine making it says on the brochure, where we are due to stay for two nights before heading North at a fast rate, we have about 498 miles to get to Brian and Sheila.
Tomorrow we will take it a little easier, after all it is a Sunday.
