garote | Entries tagged with bicycling

Andrew and I rode out together to a Starbucks to do some work. He wrapped his laptop in a towel and roped it to the rear rack since he didn't have a backpack. That worked fine, but when he took it out after we locked the bikes, the laptop slipped out of the towel and smacked onto the pavement.

We got coffee and settled in at the cafe, and then Andrew found that his laptop wouldn't power up. Dead screen, no lights, no sound. We lamented the loss for only a minute or so, then turned directly to solutions. Andrew needed a working laptop as soon as possible to stay employed. Even letting 24 hours pass would be a huge risk. Using my machine we opened a dozen tabs on Craigslist and narrowed them down to a handful of laptops similar to Andrew's, then sent emails and texts to all the sellers.

It would take some time before we got a response, so I settled in to do some work and Andrew unlocked his bike and headed back to the AirBnB to receive a package of car parts that was delivered in our absence. He stopped at a cool ice cream shop along the way. A half-hour later he texted me to say that one of the laptop sellers had responded, but they were located in Cambridge and wanted to meet at 9:30pm after work. We did some planning and realized that there was only one more train down from Boston to Stoughton after 9:30pm, so the schedule would be tight, but we could make it. Andrew confirmed the exact location and that the person would meet us at 9:30pm sharp, then he got on the train from Stoughton with his bike, and when it stopped in Canton I boarded it with mine.

We rode away from the South Station towards the general Cambridge area, stopping to eat at a cool and hip-looking grilled cheese restaurant. We lounged on the benches and gazed out through the open windows into the street, pointing out people with interesting clothing, and chatted about college towns and city life, and differences we saw between West- and East-coast urban people.

There was still plenty of time to kill after that, so I suggested riding to another ice cream shop called J. P. Licks near the Harvard campus. Andrew shrugged. Why not? With a name like that it's probably got some cool flavors, right? Alas, no. Their freezer just had the standards. A bakery down the street proved to be much more interesting, and we both got chocolatey items and sat around making dumb jokes and talking about engineering and job opportunities, and the cost of living in the Bay Area.

There was still an hour to kill, so we walked around the Harvard campus and chatted about schools and admissions, and took nighttime photos. The school marching band walked by us, rehearsing tunes as they went. They were all on their way to the Harvard stadium to play for a game, and we followed them on bikes for a while, but their route went a bit too far south so we diverged. That gave us just enough time to ride back along the riverfront into the Cambridge area, then it was time to meet the fellow selling the laptop.

He turned out to be a foreign gentleman about our age, rather than a student. I suspected he might be an instructor or lab worker for a tech company nearby, but didn't ask. The laptop was in good working order so we accepted it and Andrew paid him the cash. We had about half an hour to get to the train station so there was no hurry, and we set out on a direct route.

On Massachusetts Avenue we entered the left turn lane for Commonwealth Avenue, and since the other lane was clear I cruised through the intersection even though the left turn arrow wasn't lit. I saw that Andrew was still waiting, so I paused at the corner to wait for him. As I was staring down the street in the direction we would go, I heard a bang and a crunching sound behind me. I whipped my head around and saw an SUV stopped in the left turn lane facing the wrong way, just where Andrew had been standing.

As I watched, the driver hit the gas again and the car rocked and made a few more crunching noises. As it went from the turn lane into the opposite lane, Andrew's bike emerged from beneath it. A moment later the SUV shot through the next intersection, running the red light, and I could see Andrew crouching on the ground about ten feet from his bike, apparently unhurt but with a very angry expression on his face.

"What the hell??" he shouted after the driver. We both watched as the SUV raced down to the next intersection, paused momentarily, and then charged through the red light at that intersection, squealing the tires as it rounded the corner onto Beacon Street.

Andrew got up and walked to his bike, and I lifted mine onto the sidewalk and kick-standed it and ran to him. Together we carried his bike - which had a bent rear wheel and rack - to the closest curb. When we got there, two strangers ran over to us and declared that they had seen the whole thing.

"Did you get the license number?" I asked Andrew.

He instantly rattled off a string of letters and numbers, which I wrote in my phone.

"I saw she was cutting that turn too close," he said, still out of breath. "She wasn't looking. She made a left right across my lane. I managed to jump out of the way but I had to jump off the bike. She slammed right into it. Looked right at me. Then she just floored it and took off!"

"Damn," said one of the bystanders. "That's a stone cold bitch."

"I already dialed 9-1-1," said the other. "There's an officer on the way."

The police and an ambulance arrived a few minutes later. The bystander thought the driver had run over Andrew's foot, hence the ambulance. Miraculously, Andrew was unhurt except for some bruising, thanks almost entirely to his long-running hobby of mountain biking. He knew how to launch himself off a bike and land gracefully in a sudden crash.

We all took down reports for the police, and griped a bit about the conflict between cyclists and drivers and how awful that particular intersection was. Then since Andrew's bike was mangled, the officer in charge suggested he give Andrew a ride to the train station, which was nice. We struggled for a while to get the front wheel off the bike and managed to cram everything into the trunk of the car.

I rode the rest of the way to the train station, interrogating my own cycling instincts as I went. Had I accidentally misdirected Andrew to a spot he wouldn't have otherwise gone, when he was following me? It didn't seem that way, but I worried nevertheless. I took a certain amount of pride in my ability to safely lead others along cycling runs through complicated foreign terrain, having done it for years. I didn't want to be wrong. Was my style still too aggressive or confusing to drivers? On the other hand, when a driver plows straight into a left-turn lane without looking, what can you do to anticipate that?

I thought back to what I'd done. Instead of sitting in the left turn lane like I was legally required to do, I'd made the left early, against a red arrow, because the opposite lane was clear. I'd done that because I'm impatient. I suppose the other thing it did was get me out of the middle of the road a bit sooner. Was that wise? I couldn't tell. There was no bike lane where I stopped.

We missed the late direct train so we boarded the train that took us to the adjacent town. When we got there, I rode for the house while Andrew called a Lyft. It was a long wait because few drivers would venture that far south of the city, but Andrew made it slightly more worthwhile for the driver who did pick him up by telling him the story of the hit-and-run. The delay for the driver to arrive was so long however that he only arrived at the house a minute before I did on my bike.

We were still wired by the evening's events, so Andrew took some time to repair the back end of the bike with a few tools I borrowed from the basement. We listened to some old Firesign Theater, and he cooked up a pile of fajitas to use up the ingredients we'd stashed in the fridge. It was our last night at this rental so we had to pack everything up. The next place might not have a fridge.

While we worked I called up Rachel and told her the story of the accident. She was appalled, and very glad that Andrew was okay. So was I!

Right in the middle of working on code my brain suddenly shouts "Hey! Open Google Earth and look around at cool bike routes in Eastern Europe!!"

I'm like, "NO brain, you have code to write!"

Still, it's tempting. Looking at recorded GPS routes amassed by other adventurous souls across the world is really fun. You can zoom in and look at all the curves and funky buildings and imagine being out there. Obviously that's what my brain wants.

Mind you, I'm already writing code in a pretty great place: A folding chair on a patch of lawn, underneath a beautiful tree, in the sun-dappled gardens next to the clock tower at UC Berkeley. I got here by riding my bike up the hill, so I've already been riding today for nearly an hour. My brain wants to keep riding.

"No! Work to do!"

"But the air is so clear! After a week of forest fires nearly blotting out the sun with smoke and poisonous gas! I should be out exploring!"

"Come on! You were just riding! You went on a month-long ride across Nevada recently! Give it a rest!"

And so it goes. My work setup here is fantastic, especially during COVID times when I'm lucky to even have a job. But my brain has always been a writhing fish, jumping around on the deck of obligation, trying to fling itself back into the big blue sea of doing whatever it wants.

Perhaps this short post will help. And some jazzy down-tempo techno music from the 90's.

Dangit, I've put on a track with cool voice samples. "Soylent Green" from "Earth To Infinity".

In the background of the song, under a pulsing electronic beat, an earnest woman says:

"I remember the absolutely stunned hush. I remember the sense of wanting to stay indoors at this particular moment. Not because something was going to fall from the sky, but because the sense of crisis was so intense."

Dangit, now I'm googling to figure out where these samples came from... There goes more precious work time. At least the search was brief.

Turns out all the voice samples are from an episode of a PBS series called "Making Sense of the Sixties" that aired back in 1991, when I was a high school freshman. Here's the relevant episode with a relevant quote: ( https://youtu.be/OW-GgFinUhc?t=1597 ) .

Okay. Maybe now I can get back to work, brain? Maybe?

"Okay. For a while."

Sheesh.

In conversation with myself.

Do you think that a bike tour is the gateway to a more interesting life?

Do you think that the interesting things you can see from the seat of a bike make up for all the time you spent at your job, staring at screens, shut inside yourself? Staying up late because you felt unsatisfied at the end of another day spent working, saving up money so you can have an adventure?

Sure there is adventure, and good conversation. Stories to tell, fresh air, exercise, good food. Always a new thing rolling down from the horizon. There's no denying that a bike tour could bring happiness. But why this particular choice? Any why persevere, through the hard parts -- the inevitable rain and cold and hunger, the long empty patches of road where there is no one to talk to, nothing to chew on but your own curious thoughts -- and the times when you're deeply uncomfortable, when you wish for the chance to simply stop and put down roots somewhere, with an urgency that belies it as a human need like food and company... What compels you to spend your limited time on Earth doing this thing?

Is it ego? Are you trying to prove something to yourself?

Imagine you've already met your goal; made your journey, and you're back home in your daily routine again. What have you proved except that you can exploit the available technology in a somewhat unconventional means, to go on what most everyone around you will see as a weird extended vacation? One that most people would not choose for themselves, and would not be able to relate to? Because really, people do not like riding their bikes as much as you do. They will not get it. You seem like a nut-job more than an adventurer, placing yourself in danger on the road, especially when everyone around you is "getting there" faster in a car.

People smile and say "that sounds cool," and sincerely wish you luck. But make no mistake: They don't relate. What you're doing isn't cool.

Likewise, you can't be in it for the rebellion, for the "coolness points" of doing something different that sets you apart from others. There's no happiness in competing for novelty -- only a caustic version of pride. No matter how interesting your bike tour actually becomes, there are people all over the Earth who have spent their time doing far more interesting things, far more often, and being so dang humble about it that you don't even know they exist unless you blunder into them and talk awhile. You will probably meet a bunch of them as you go.

No, if happiness does emerge from this journey, it comes from meeting your own personal expectations.

What do you expect?

What sets those expectations? You weren't born with them, you learned them. Where did they come from? Consider your personal history.

You grew up playing adventure games, traveling far away in your imagination -- and surrounded by the redwood forest, deep and quiet, blurring the line between your imagination and real places. You grew up riding a bicycle, and have come back to it in adulthood, integrating it with your daily life, working against the car-focused environment and economy surrounding you. Visions of far away lands have been brought to you by the internet, and a flood of practical information as well. This age of scientific wonders, and the accumulated toil of countless generations before it, has knit the world together with roads and airlines and shipping routes, and the gear to explore them is affordable. It's all there, visible online.

You see a goal within reach, but not too close, like a mountaineer scheming to reach a summit "because it's there." Just how far could you ride? Just how far could your mind range? You calibrate your expectations and your happiness based on what's available. You make it up as you go along, and perhaps you're even conscious of how arbitrary that is.

It feels like these threads have been converging over years, over decades even. How much of your life, in retrospect, has been about this idea?

But then again, how much of this is just selective remembering -- a story you're making up about your distant past to justify your actions? A lot of it, probably. Why make up the story? Maybe it's not your past but your present life that holds the answers.

Lately you've been spending way too much time immobilized behind a desk. That desk is the centerpiece of a routine you follow almost every day. It goes: Get up, ride to work, stare at screens, talk about programming and science with nice people, eat some food - hopefully something nourishing - spend a little time with loved ones, read a book or watch a film, run a few basic errands, and then go to bed for a night of unquiet dreams. Then start the routine again.

It's not a bad routine. In fact, it's a routine that most people on Earth would happily assemble and roll with for their entire lives. There are undeniably good things about it; things you cannot pack up and take with you on two wheels.

But it's still a routine. And there's no doubt you would break this routine if you started a long bicycle trip. If you picked yourself up out of your home, moved thousands of miles outside your comfort zone, dropped down in an unfamiliar land with some hardware and a map, and had to contend with the elements and interact with the locals to move yourself across the globe, your routine would be totally demolished. It's impossible to stay in one place while riding a bike, so a desk is out of the question. (Same with computer screens. Only the tiniest of screens fits on a bike and if you stare at it for more than a few seconds you fly into a ditch.)

You would be forced to witness the world, rather than think about it abstractly like you have for too many years. And perhaps that's exactly what you want. Maybe it isn't happiness you're seeking, or the execution of a grand plan; maybe it's an intervention. Life in one place has gotten too easy, and you used to have expectations for how it would all arrange itself, but life outmaneuvered and outlasted your expectations, and now you've drifted into this weird place nobody warned you about, and been seized by this weird idea as a means of escape.

What do you want?

Is this a "midlife crisis?" What's your crisis; being bored? If you did exactly what you're doing now but you were 20 years old, even motivated by the same sense of boredom, would you doubt yourself? Would others?

"Go out there and explore!" they would say. "You're young, you don't need to think about anything permanent at your age."

What about now? Instead they would say, "You're old. You're supposed to be settled into something and know what you want out of life." And "settled in" means, among other things, staying in one place.

You've been settled before. More than once.

You've managed to work your way into plenty of situations that seemed ideal at the time - jobs, relationships, living spaces - and moved on from them eventually. Your only regret each time was not doing it before things got as bad or as boring as they did. Not everything requires escape of course; some things just require difficult adjustments, and then they continue in another way. But to pursue this particular crazy idea - a long-range bike trip - you are taking apart things in your life that are good as well as bad. That's obsession. And probably stupidity as well.

People all over the world struggle mightily just to claim a fraction of the resources and connections you have acquired and kept during your life, let alone things that you have accidentally or deliberately wasted. If the extreme good fortune of your position is not apparent to you now, it will be apparent soon, because this journey will put you in close contact with many of those less fortunate. How will you feel then, about what you left behind? How stupid will you look to the people you meet, when you try to explain yourself?

But on the other hand...

What if you don't have a choice?

Life is full of contradictions and it should not be surprising that something that seems like a really bad idea also seems like a really great one.

You're well into your forties. By all accounts your life is more than half done. Way more, if you think of it in terms of the aging of your mind and memory. What kind of joke would the back half of your existence be if you spent years on the cusp of a journey that you could quite easily have taken, only to turn around and creep back into your house, close the door, and keep taking the paycheck and eating the fat meals?

Even if it's a difficult journey to finish, it's trivially easy to start. Just get on the bike and keep going. People have bicycled all around the world hundreds of years before you were born, and (you hope) thousands and thousands more will during your lifetime and long after. If they can do it, so can you. Do you really need a reason? Ego, identity, change, intervention, escape... Why are you so worried about it?

It doesn't matter. Possible answers to the question of "why" erupt like weeds - fresh ones every day - and you pull them up, inspect them, and throw them in a pile. The only thing you are certain of is the obsession itself. Unprompted, irreducible, and stubbornly refusing to fade. You've spent so long thinking about it, outlining scenarios and testing hardware and saving money, that at this point if you didn't do it, you might not have much of an identity to fall back on. You'd be some vague person with a job and a house and some good relationships who thought about something really hard for years to the point where it began to seriously interfere with and alter their life ... and then dropped it.

Are you afraid of what you'll learn? Are you afraid in general? For how much longer are you willing to put up with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously preparing to go and planning to stay? The world is absolutely flooded with opportunities to miss. There is no shortage of them, only a shortage of time. Past a certain level of preparedness, the days you spend preparing turn into their own thing. Are you more comfortable with preparing than you are with actually doing? Are you comfortable in purgatory, and questioning your motives so you'll stay?

Get on with it. Whatever happens - good or bad, or even just boring - it will be your choice. You'd better be okay with it.

Friends, family, fellow Internet denizens. I don’t usually write online about my personal life these days. Mainly because the internet has changed over the 25+ years I’ve been blogging, and it’s too easy now for strangers and robots to correlate what I say with other people whose privacy I would rather protect. Today's an exception, because I have a fun bit of news that there's no harm in sharing.

Most of you already know that I am pretty obsessed with bicycle touring. As time and funds have permitted in my life, I’ve taken longer and more complicated trips, the longest being about two months. Occasionally I hear about other bike tourists who are so hardcore and obsessed that they have cycled across entire continents or even around the world. That idea has always felt bold and intimidating, but not for me. The last time it came up was seven years ago, and it dropped into the back of my head and percolated there until I forgot about it.

Fast-forward a bunch of time, to 2018. Last year, I was feeling stagnated in my job, tired of my living space, and bored with the geography of the Bay Area. I’d been obsessively playing the computer game Civilization V, and the art deco monuments and colorful pastel mountains and rivers had colonized my imagination. The world was full of light and conflict. I’d just finished a loopy sci-fi novel by Stephen Baxter about spacefaring Roman legions and moon-dwelling Incan tribes, and though the premise was absurd, the collision of remote culture and high technology was inspiring. It came up again in a surreal novel by Dan Simmons: Quantum technology and the siege of Troy, on Mars! My mind was an avalanche of sandstone and granite ruins knotted with ivy and wildflowers, teeming with people in exotic clothes, trading or fighting or building together.

I was seized with the urge to take a vacation, and go far out into the world and touch the artifacts of history. But while I was still working, it would have to be a typical Silicon Valley "get away from the desk" vacation, and I knew how those usually went. I'd be in a rush, moving between various modes of transport, skipping across thousands of miles to hit a packaged highlight reel of well-traveled attractions, trying to use the experience as a hammer to smash some dents into a brain shaped by months and months of software engineering. The vacation would not be for its own sake, it would be to prepare me for another six months back at work.

I knew that would not do. These ideas were calling for a bigger change. I spent several weekends biking around and sketching in the beautiful Mountain View cemetery at the end of Piedmont Avenue, enjoying the fresh air and the quiet, sun-warmed granite monoliths. I began browsing around in Google Earth, tracking down the cities I’d conquered and the wonders I’d built in Civilization, and reading about the history and geography of far off places. Samarkand… In the first edition of Civilization it’s the seat of power of the Mongolians. In Civilization V it’s a powerful, independent city-state usually located in desert. Where is it really? Here it is, in Uzbekistan. There’s a country named Uzbekistan? Wow, I didn’t even know that. How could there be a country that I do not know the name of, at my age?

I started thinking a lot about my picture of the world, and how much of it was based on unverified assumptions, convenient metaphors, current political fashions, and apocryphal stories. I felt intensely ignorant and confined. I needed to break out of my routine, and experience the world outside in a direct and personal way. I needed to crowbar myself out of an existence that was too comfortable. If I didn't have the means now, when would I ever? Suddenly, the idea of a long-range bike tour popped up from the depths of my mind, threw confetti in my face, and said, “hey idiot, remember me?”

At first I didn’t know what to do. The idea was equal parts enthralling and terrifying, giving me a sense of ambivalence, but it was also sticking hard in my brain like a flyer glued to the windshield of a car. A real long-range bike tour means leaving the Bay Area for a long time. It means spending my savings, and it means I need to rent out my current place to help pay for the house, otherwise my savings would vanish immediately. It means quitting or renegotiating my job. It means being away from my friends and family. Most important of all, it means not having a significant other, because what girlfriend in her right mind would actually be interested in a crazy journey like this?

For a while I hoped the idea would diminish, as it had before, so I wouldn’t have to confront its practical details. But it just set up camp and grew larger and rowdier like a Greek army laying siege to the city of my mind. Eventually, during an intense discussion where I felt encouraged to take risks, I spoke out loud about the idea for the first time. It was like opening the city gates. As I heard myself describe it, trying to convey the intensity of it to another person, the Greek army rushed inside, and suddenly I no longer belonged to myself. I belonged to this journey.

So. I intend to begin a long bicycle trip carrying all my gear, starting in Iceland, with a destination of England. Perhaps by then I will be sick of traveling. Perhaps I will settle in England, or return to California. Or perhaps I will continue on, through Spain and France. Perhaps I will circumnavigate the planet. Who knows?

The tentative departure date is 100 days from now.

This raises a lot of questions, like “Are you crazy?” and, “How long will this take?” and, “Are you aware of these things we have, called cars?”, and of course, “Do you know how dangerous this is?”

I’ll answer that last question up front by saying, yes, this is dangerous. In the coming months I’m not going to talk about the danger much, because it’s not something I want to dwell on, but I should at least say that if I do end up frozen solid in a snowdrift, or dead at the bottom of a ravine with my equipment scattered around me, or - most likely - squashed flat by a truck like Wile E. Coyote in the desert, that this is something I accepted as a possibility when I started. And I chose to do it anyway.

Yes, it's a fatalistic attitude. But in the time leading up to this journey I have become so obsessed with the idea of attempting it that it has started to feel like an inevitability. Like a part of my identity. If I was any less obsessed maybe I would choose to stay at home. Keep circling in that worn-down trench between house, workplace, and supermarkets; maybe take a series of smaller risks. But I honestly feel like I don’t have that choice any more. The Greek army has plundered the city, and is running it now. If I am fated for the snowdrift, or the ravine, or the logging truck, then so be it!

There's also the possibility that I will grow to hate this journey after I embark. After three or four months on the bicycle, toiling up hills in the middle of nowhere, I may suddenly snap, dump my equipment in a pawnshop, and buy a ticket back to the states. That is an acceptable outcome. But I’m also pretty stubborn, so -- we’ll see! We must, most definitely, see.

In the coming days I'll post more about this, but most things will go to mile42.net , a Wordpress site I set up that gives me more creative freedom with photos and maps and layouts.

100 days and counting until I set out.

Fun story: Four years ago in West Oakland I lived with a guy who kept a gun in his closet. It was in a locked box and he kept the ammo separated. He was a responsible gun owner; he even made sure that I knew how to use it "just in case". He was a little twitchy though... He would sometimes harangue the homeless guys who came up to root through our recycling cans, claiming that they were "casing the place". He also installed chintzy security bars on the front windows, more for the look than anything else, since a reasonably strong adult could tear them off with one arm. He admitted it was "security theater," but the point was to make busting into the house slower, not impossible.

He never told anyone else that there was a firearm in the house. That would have made us much bigger targets for theft. The only point to having it was so we could use it in a bad enough situation. But what would that be?

During my time in West Oakland, I was a witness to - and occasional victim of - all kinds of mayhem, from smash-and-grab burglary to drive-by shootings to fistfights and domestic drama in the street outside. A fair amount of that activity came from an obvious crackhouse halfway down the block. At no point did I say to myself, "time to get out the gun." What would it have taken, for me to think that? I imagined a large man with his own firearm, breaking in through a front window at 3:00 in the morning, intending to execute us in our beds so he could take his time stealing our ... what? Double homicide for a couple of old bicycles, and few thousand dollars worth of computer crap that would be hard to fence?

The gun didn't really move the needle on my feeling of safety. What did, was knowing who my neighbors were and being on good terms with them. We lived downstairs from a huge gang of punks, all crammed into the upper flat, and we made friends with as many as we could. They watched over the place - literally. We also got on a first-name basis with the houses on either side, and the shop owner across the street, and a bunch of the people who loitered there. It was easy because there was always something to talk about, in the form of whatever crazy thing had just happened.

We also didn't go out on foot when we could use a bicycle instead. That one habit probably kept us from getting mugged about a dozen times. From this I can only conclude:

A bicycle kept us safer than a gun.

I imagine my reasoning would be different if I was a single mom in West Oakland with kids to protect. That break-in scenario would have much worse elements added to it. And if my ex-husband was the violent type, or if I knew my kids were in a bad crowd... I can see why I might have a gun. I am very lucky that I don't look or feel like an easy target, and that my job isn't dangerous.

I do worry about those guns being stolen or used against their owners, though. We unlock our phones with a fingerprint -- why not our firearms? The hardware is already shockproof...

I think it's time to admit it:

I am a bicycling nut.

In fact, it's time to go beyond that, and admit that my very life - in the form of my health - depends on bicycling.

For the past week I've been suffering, because a support strut broke on the seat of my recumbent:

With no immediate replacement, I've been forced - FORCED I tell you - to ride my "upright" bicycle again. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the upright. It's an old Bridgestone frame customized into a good touring bike, and I've taken it on many rides including a brief tour of Tasmania:

... But it's not my recumbent. It's not that speedy, panoramic experience I've grown used to, where every joint is perfectly at ease. And that little difference is making me cycle a little less. And with that, I suffer. Wailing; gnashing of teeth, et cetera!

My mood is more down. My work goes slower. My sleep is more restless. My appetite no longer matches my exercise level, so I'm gaining weight. It's all going just a little bit crap, because I can't hop on my favorite bike. That's a pretty big deal. And it's a state of things that I should recognize.

So, fine. I'm a bicycling nut. Even though I don't own any lycra clothing.

Onward!!

We were up and about with plenty of time to wait for the shuttle that would take us safely up the mountain, but Kerry wasn't feeling well, so we sat around in the sun near the depot instead of doing our usual excited exploring. While we waited, a group of girls from a Christian school asked if they could sing us a song as part of a "scavenger hunt" their class was participating in. I couldn't help recording the show - it was amusing and a bit weird.

Kerry noticed that there were bees flying around the station, hunting moths. It was some kind of moth genocide, in fact. A bee would fly up to the plants near the bench, locate and carefully land on a moth, then methodically cut its head off. The headless corpse would drop onto the sidewalk, and the bee would fly on to the next moth. Perhaps this was an evolved form of pest control for the plants that sustained the bees?

As an aside, I've often wondered how modern farmers exploit these relationships between predator and prey. Everything has a predator, right? Wasps hunting caterpillars, beetles hunting aphids... It sounds like a fascinating area to study. I remember buying a box of ladybugs to protect my backyard lettuce crop, but the little jerks all flew and crawled away without seeming to notice the eggs and aphids I wanted them to eat. Bah!

The shuttle from Ohakune to National Park arrived with a bike trailer designed for regular bikes, but with a little guesswork we managed to get the recumbents secured.

We were traveling off-schedule and hadn't bothered to book a room in advance, so we rode around National Park and scoped out the options. We wanted to be comfortable during our brief downtime, and that meant a clean place with thick walls and plenty of hot water - and internet, since I had plenty of photos to upload. We settled on the Plateau Lodge, and Kerry laid down for a nap while I rode out to explore the town a bit.

Here's the automated weather station outside of National Park. There's a line buried in the road leading out to some kind of sensor under one of the lanes. I'm not sure what it's for - perhaps an electromagnet to count cars?

To the north I could see a long sheet of storm clouds weaving itself around the base of the mountains where we planned to embark on the Tongariro Crossing the next day. The weather was not going to cooperate, and in any case, Kerry was probably going to be too weak to attempt the crossing. Our schedule needed to change.

Here's how they indicate whether the highway is passable. Road crews can change the sign from "open" to "closed" by flipping a metal plate back and forth. Pretty nifty.

I like how they put in a metal flap to hold the plate down during storms. The flap is held in place with a twisted piece of wire, and I couldn't help thinking that if this was in the United States, there would have to be a padlock on it instead just to keep pranksters from flipping the sign as a joke.

I ate some snacks from a local gas station, chatted on the phone with a few family members, and rode back to check on Kerry. She was up, so we tackled the next thing on our to-do lost: Locating the box with our sleeping bags that we'd shipped to Adrift Outdoors, the river touring company.

We couldn't locate the Adrift Outdoors office, so we called the shipping company to ask exactly where they'd delivered the box. They left it with the staff at the restaurant on Waimarino Tokaanu Road. Confusing. We located the restaurant and quizzed the cook, and he said he used to have the box, but a week ago he took it to the office in the back of the building, so we went around there and found a sliding door with a bunch of rafting equipment visible behind it - but the door was locked.

I dug through my emails and found a phone number for Adrift Outdoors and called it, standing around in the parking lot. The woman who answered explained that Adrift Outdoors wasn't actually run from the office in the restaurant, but that's where everybody met up to prepare for each excursion in the morning, so it was the most sensible place to put a map marker. I had to agree. But what about the box?

"We haven't received any sleeping bags here, sorry. We did get a strange box a week or so ago."
"A strange box? What was in it?"
"Just a couple of metal plates, with wheels attached, and cloth straps wound around them."

Ahah. Somewhere along the line, the shipping company messed up, and the hardware we use to move the bicycle boxes around at the airport was sent to National Park, and our sleeping bags got sent ahead to New Plymouth where we would be disassembling the bikes. Not a showstopper; we could just borrow some sleeping bags from Adrift Outdoors, and carry the metal plates from here to New Plymouth.

We talked with the Adrift manager for a while about the weather, which wasn't looking good due to an approaching cyclone. Our best option would be to move the canoe trip up a few days, starting it tomorrow, and do the Tongariro Crossing afterwards, perhaps with a day of rest in between.

So we ate dinner, then rode home to pack up for the canoe trip!

Packing list:

covered sandals
shorts
light top
2 warm tops
a waterproof rain jacket
sun hat
sunglasses
suntan lotion
personal medical needs
set of spare warm clothing to change into at night including underwear
2 pairs of socks
water bottle
sleeping bag
camera

We did a late checkout, deciding to leave Taupo a day early to gain some flexibility later.

The woman behind the desk apologized several times about being unavailable by phone the previous night to deal with the noisemakers. She was fine with our early departure, and made a lot of comments about how cool our bicycles were as we did final packing and rode away, downhill to the visitor center.

It was difficult deciding whether to wait for a shuttle with limited space, or start riding immediately for the city on the south side of the lake. The first bus that was going in the right direction was a double-decker with a very small luggage area, but the second was a conventional shape with just enough space, so we piled in and headed towards the the small town of Waiouru, intending to go clockwise around the Tongariro National Park by cycling the 15-mile highway connecting Waiouru to Ohakune, which was almost entirely downhill, and catching the other shuttle route up to National Park, skipping the nasty uphill portion of the ride. It meant skipping the hot springs near Turangi, but it was a lot more sane than our original plan to ride from Taupo to National Park via Highway 47 over three days, which was 70 miles and about 4000 feet of ascent with the Tongariro Crossing crammed into the third day. In retrospect that would have been a disaster.

Waiouru was a tiny fart of a town with a military base nearby. We had some crappy sausage and chips for lunch, eating next to a ragtag gang called the "Mighty Mongrel Mob". Yep, they're a real thing.

Don't mess with the Mighty Mongrel Mob! They might sit on you.

It was actually pretty interesting to run into this group. It made me thoughtful, as I ate my crappy sausage, about how so many of the cultural divisions in this world can ONLY exist because of the physical divisions that feed them. For example, if the members of the Mongrel Mob had easy, unrestricted, permanent access to the same physical space that the Justin Bieber Fan Club used for meetings, how long before the Justin Bieber Fan Club got beat up, robbed, raped, and trashed out of existence? Or would they harden and fight back, and quickly lose their taste for Beiber's vacuous music, and dissolve from the inside out? Afterwards we might have one unified large group, called the Mighty Beiber Mongrel Fan Alliance or something.

But that scenario can't and won't happen, because the Justin Bieber Fan Club - and other fluffy cultural groups like it - has enough open space and crowd anonymity that the Mongrel Mob would simply never be able to corner them.

To generalize the example, a group of aggressive assholes might believe they are dominant, and spend their entire lives declaring and believing it, while completely unaware that there are other, more productive, richer, healthier, less violent groups all around that are simply very good at avoiding them. Thus, a physical division created deliberately by one group can define the contents, and even the destiny, of another group that seeks no such division.

I find that very interesting, from an anthropological standpoint especially.

To bring it back down to Earth: Everyone avoids the Mongrel Mob because it's generally a bunch of dicks, so the Mongrel Mob festers and gets even more dicky.

Anyway, rain began to pour, so we wrapped up in our water-resistant gear. We didn't have to do a lot of pedaling since Waiouru to Ohakune was 200 feet of ascent and 1000 feet of descent spread over 15 miles. Instead we enjoyed the wind and the stinging rain as it pelted our bodies and made us go "whooooo!" and "awwww yeah!"

A dozen miles along we saw a huge stripe of carrots dumped in the field to feed the sheep. Crunch crunch crunch!

Then a few more miles after that, we encountered ... this ... (If you click on it it's a movie.)

In Ohakune we spotted a hotel built right behind a thai restaurant and went to check it out. The restaurant turned out to be closed but the hotel was decent, so we checked in and went walking around for a good meal. Ohakune is small - only about 1000 residents, spread thin - but the tourist trade is lively so we had at least half-a-dozen open restaurants to choose from.

The third restaurant we checked seemed okay, and the food tasted good. We drank cider by the fireplace and people queued up old 80's and 90's rock songs on the stereo, by walking up to a laptop wired to the wall and searching on YouTube. I queued up "Changes" by David Bowie and no one seemed to mind.

The matron of the establishment congratulated us on finishing all of our food, like we were good kids. That might not have been so praiseworthy, though, because by the time we got back to the hotel room it was clear that Kerry had food poisoning. She barfed in the bathroom for a while. Bees kept flying in the open window and accosting her while she concentrated.

"I learned an important lesson," she said. "I cannot digest an entire half-pound of milk cream in one night!"

Yesterday began with petting the local cat. Today begins with meeting some adorable ducks!

Then we launched a double-kayak out onto Lake Taupo, the first of two water excursions for the day, both scheduled 2 months in advance via the Taupo branch of Canoe & Kayak. The weather was overcast but we didn't mind - the important thing is that we didn't get rained out.

( And then it just kept getting better... )

Start the day off right, with a visit to the local kittycat! (We found this cute fellow when we stopped for snacks at the thermal park, on the way out of the area.) It's a movie, but since this is LiveJournal, it won't embed, so you're gonna have to click. Sorry...

It was easier to stop at the park than to prepare any kind of breakfast at Hotel Waiotapu, since every item in their self-service area was broken and smelled faintly of fried electronics - including the kettle, the microwave, and the fridge. Clearly that place makes its money by being very conveniently located, not by offering anything close to decent amenities or service.

(As we checked out, Kerry and I noticed that even though our room was tiny, someone had found enough room in it to place a bible. Somebody - neither of us is willing to admit who it was - wrote inside it, "ALL THE PILLS MEANS ALL THE JESUS!" and put it back in the drawer.)

Anyway our task for today was to go 30 miles south from Waiotapu to Taupo, on the shores of Lake Taupo. Highway 5 is the main route between these two places, but the heavy traffic is not ideal for cycling. Fortunately Broadlands Road covers most of the same distance and is much quieter. (Nevertheless we still encountered plenty of big trucks, and had to pull entirely off the road for some of them.)

Along the way we found even more snacks, on a handy apple tree leaning over a farmer's fence:

I gathered five apples but I only ended up eating one, for reasons that will become clear later!

Check out this aged sign in front of a country residence. Can you decipher it?

The weather was glorious, yet again. We pedaled through gently rolling hills and flatlands radiant with a hundred shades of green and yellow, chatting on our intercoms and stopping wherever we wanted to take photographs or mess with our gear or pee behind a bush - or simply hang out. We had the entire day to go 30 miles, most of which was easy riding.

We saw lots of animals on the farmlands surrounding the road (and a few more animals squished onto the surface and baking in the sun) but the two that eventually tempted us enough to stop were these fine horses:

They loved the fresh grass we gave them from the other side of the fence, and definitely loved the apples that we tossed over for them to sniff out and pick up later.

(It takes a little bit of practice to feed a strange horse without being bitten.) (The image below is actually a movie! Please do poke it.)

We named these horses "Bully" and "Bieber". Bully is the domineering one on the right, of course.

The road rolled by, along with the sunny afternoon. Sometimes it felt like I was back in California, cycling around Moss Landing or Hollister. But then I'd see a logging truck, or something like the Ohaaki Power Station and remember where I was.

The flat eventually changed to a mild uphill with a slight headwind, which combined to make our progress extremely slow. We spent hours covering what seemed like only a few miles leading in to Taupo, and finally arrived at the top of a hill, where we paused for a break and saw a gigantic logging truck - the largest one either of us had ever seen in New Zealand - push out into the intersection and go chugging away. It was so epic we had to film it. (Yep, another video you'll have to click to see. Sorry...)

It has 42 wheels. Go ahead and count 'em! It took 1/3 of a minute just to roll across the intersection.

I don't think it's any coincidence that the opposite corner of the intersection is residence for a grave marker, identifying some sad highway accident from the recent past:

And not too far away: The gravesite of Optimus Prime?

After that it was almost all downhill into Taupo. The motel was easy to find and only a block away from the kayak place we needed to show up at the next day. We walked down to a thai take-out place and grabbed food, chomping it right there on the sidewalk on a tiny table, then walked back to the motel and crashed. Ka-bam!!

It was another great day, even though it was just a little too long in the saddle.

So, we set off a-wandering from the Waiotapu Tavern and in a few hours we were face-to-face with this:

A great, big, boiling, festering mud hole in the middle of the forest!

You probably can't hear it in the video, but it's making noise like a couple of horses throwing a dance party in a closet. An endless, semi-rhythmic thudding sound that doesn't just vibrate your ears, but vibrates the whole area around you.

The truly great thing about this experience was the act of discovery. Kerry and I just crept into the untracked forest to find the source of a mysterious noise, and ended up staring at this infernal thing. No guideropes, no fences, no warning signs. Not even anyone else around. If your judgement is poor and you tumble over the edge, you will die, and chances are nobody will even discover your corpse for a long time. By the time they do, your flesh will be boiled into mush, leaving only a stew of bones and some expensive equipment to tempt the next victim.

Awesome!!

( But I'm telling this tale out of order. )

After checking out, we rode down to a general store and bought a few snacks while people ogled our bikes. After so many years, I still actually like the attention that riding a recumbent attracts. Added eyeballs means added safety!

I scarfed some leftover thai food while Kerry was in the store, and answered a few polite questions. The number one question people ask is, "is that more comfortable than a regular bike?" To which my stock answer is, "pretty much all the time, yes, except when going over really bumpy roads because you can't stand up on the pedals."

( Ten minutes later we were off... )Here's the day's route:

Today we got another early-morning call with bad news. No dolphin snorkeling activity for us - the sea was still too choppy. Kerry and I decided that Whakatane was bad luck, so we checked out a day early and shoved our bicycles into a bus, and rode it back up to the lovely lakeside city of Rotorua.

The highway seemed even more twisty on this return trip, and we both got upset stomachs. It was early afternoon when we arrived in Rotorua, and instead of setting out immediately on the bike path towards Waiotapu, we decided to use our extra day to recuperate a little more and get an earlier start the next morning.

Most of the hotels in Rotorua were booked solid, and most of the rest had very high prices. Eventually we found one that was affordable and only a little bit crusty, and we flopped onto the bed and napped until our stomachs felt better. The discomfort inspired us to go through our luggage again and prepare another box of gear that we could ship directly to New Plymouth, instead of hauling it around for another three weeks. We paid for shipping online and left the box with the hotel receptionist, who promised to hand it to the carrier when they came by the next day.

I've been thinking lately: Travel is often romanticized and overrated, especially when it's the kind of travel that's packaged and sold to the middle class - and the aspiring middle class. For a while now I've been lucky enough to consider myself middle class, and one of the reasons I know this is, I have become a target for these romanticized, packaged experiences.

In the case of New Zealand, the package is obvious to me. It's, "come wander through a working model of Middle Earth! You'll dance with Hobbits, swing swords at orcs, and cast Magic Missile at the darkness!" Well, I could try and pursue that. I could completely embrace that vision - that product - and come to New Zealand intent on finding it. If I went with what the travel agents recommend, it would go like this:

Drop several thousand dollars on a helicopter ride into the mountains, then stand around for a few minutes in front of a rock formation that looks vaguely like the background plate for the city of Minas Tirith - except there's no city there, obviously. Then fly another helicopter to a meandering spot on the Mangawhero River, the backdrop for (and I quote) "the dramatic scenes of Gollum catching a fish." Then drive a few miles into a farmer's back yard, to a hill that, if you squint, kind of looks like Fort Edoras in Rohan - if you scraped off the actual fort. And look! Here's a hill that looks like Weathertop, if you squint and imagine a Weathertop-shaped structure in its place!

What better way to destroy a fantasy world? Heh heh heh.

Oh, how I mock the packaged product; but I do need to cop to the fact that I wouldn't be in New Zealand if it wasn't for the Lord Of The Rings films drawing my attention to it. Even if I'm not imagining myself in the Mines of Moria whenever I wander into a cave (like I did in Kentucky), I have still obviously been influenced by Peter Jackson's adoration for his native country, and our common roots of fantasy literature.

Kerry has been to India quite a few times. She has many stories to tell, and they thoroughly clash with the "product" of tourism in India. In India's case I think it would be fair to call that product the "Eat Pray Love experience". It goes, "be like Julia Roberts! Reject middle-class decadence by burning thousands of dollars in jet fuel to flirt with exotic men! Oh, and there's yoga, so it's totally legit." I wonder how many people see the movie, or something like it, or perhaps any one of a zillion Bollywood films, then go to India ... and it's beautiful and exotic, but it's also packed with constant harassment, heartbreaking poverty, chaos, inconvenience, and filth.

Of course, the "product" is not born of India, but more from a negative sketch of what's missing back home. And the same is true for the fantasy sketch of New Zealand. Even if we know they're fake, such things can have a perverse and lingering attraction anyway. I just burned thousands of dollars in jet fuel to ride a bicycle in an exotic location, and is there anything meaningful I'm chasing in it? Probably not. It's not for charity, it's not for self-discovery... I'm not running from a past trauma... I'm not even doing yoga! (Just some fake Tai-Chi!)

So, I can't shake the feeling that despite my high-mindedness, I am guilty of chasing the equivalent of the "Eat Pray Love experience" for geeks. I haven't thought much about the Lord Of The Rings films, except during the tour of Hobbiton - kind of hard to avoid, when you're walking around inside the Green Dragon Inn - but nevertheless I am mimicking the films in my own way, pursuing my own version of that product. I'm on a fairly self-contained journey (bicycling) through fresh air and nature (New Zealand), avoiding deadly beasts (cars) and exploring old ruins (Limestone Island) while casting Magic Missile (taking pictures)... A great antidote for my day-to-day job, which takes place at a desk. Where does the prepackaged fantasy world end, and my own mundane vacation begin? Am I the same posh, blinkered middle-class traveler that I look down upon for buying the "packaged product" of New Zealand as Middle Earth?

Perhaps I am, with just a difference in degree.

The most appalling packaged travel I ever took part in was a three-day cruise to a little island off the coast of Florida, on one of those gigantic cruise ships. There's a lot I could say about it, but I'll just say, every corner of the ship was enthusiastically designed to make me - the traveler - feel USELESS, like a pet hamster trapped in a giant food bowl. All that comfort backfired and made me feel very uncomfortable.

Maybe that's what the difference in degree is: Comfort level. Perhaps I demand some level of discomfort because it bestows some feeling of accomplishment, or worthiness. Something to set me apart from other people. Not for the impression it gives other people - I'm usually embarrassed at the attention I get when I mention my long bike tours, since I think it identifies me as crazy more than anything else - but for the impression it gives to myself. I seek something personal, in the dangerous roads, the harsh weather, the rough sleeping, the isolation. Enlightenment, on my own terms.

Well, it's true: Sometimes the uncomfortable aspects of travel can be the most enlightening, if you give them enough time to work on you. For example, I think the desolation of the small, meth-addled towns I passed through when cycling across the US helped me re-assess what was really worth worrying about in my own life. Of course, that's another thing that the middle class is vilified for: Traipsing through third-world countries and using poverty as a kind of framing device for their own trifling problems back home. I've seen plenty of scathing editorials drifting across Facebook, flouncing at "poverty fetishism", accumulating truculent "likes" like ants on roadkill.

Well, haters gonna hate, and ain'ters gonna ain't.

As an aside, I think it's very interesting that the author of Eat Pray Love wrote a followup book, gathering material about the meaning of marriage, as a tactic to conquer her own fears about it after her bitter divorce. To me, this says that "Eat Pray Love" - and the travel and the farting around and the talk of spirituality - was just a years-long phase where the author "got her sillies out" (as an ex of mine would say), and the follow-up book "Committed" is where the real work of self-improvement took place, back home in the 'States, back in another stable arrangement. I haven't read it, but perhaps she even admits to herself somewhere in those pages that she didn't have to travel to Bali to meet a man worthy of her time, and could have just as probably found one within 10 square miles of her house. She went to Bali to make her ovaries happy, just like I've seen many divorced men my age spend a fortune bedding exotic women to make their post-divorce penises happy.

All-too-human, but not exactly a spiritual awakening. ... Good thing too, because if a spiritual awakening cost that much money, it would be in very short supply!

Onward, to the next day...

( OMG WATERFALL! HURF BURF DURF )

After the excitement of Hobbiton, we took a day off in Tirau. We opened the door to our motel room, letting in the sunlight and letting out the cigarette smell, and just lazed around for the entire day, cropping photos, playing with the internet, and snacking. Aaaaaaaah!

( Here's a gallery of snacks we saw in New Zealand: )

YOU BEST CHECK YO SELF BEFORE YOU WRECK YO SELF, YKNOWHMSAYIN'?

Today we set out for Hobbiton, on a lovely 13-mile route zig-zagging past farms and pastures. Our tour was scheduled for late in the day so we had plenty of time to look around.

Let's go!!

"Hobbiton, this-a-way!" (Also, dork doing tai-chi, this-a-way.)

Well, it looks like it might be tai-chi, and I've done it before, but in this case I was just posing for the camera. Check out that beautiful countryside in the background! Sometimes it reminded me of California wine country, but less constricted by walls and highways. The hills can really stretch out and get a good roll going here.

"Caution while crossing. Your mother will guide you, while she searches for her severed left hand."

On farmland, trees often have a clear space beneath them that's a very exact height. I assume it's because the animals nibble off all the low-hanging leaves. This means you could actually figure out how tall the tallest animal in a field is, just by looking at the trees.

Kerry and I both had the same thought when we saw this bike: "If this were Oakland, that would be gone in 20 minutes or less." We're city-folk, yup...

Our picnic stop attracted a FREELOADER!!!! No free rides! Get off!

Kerry and I were mystified by these clinging dust clouds, until a local explained that they were dumping massive amounts of lime on the hillside to fertilize the soil and re-grow the grass. Here's a video of us coasting down the road, with lime distribution happening to our left:

When the wind's at our backs, we barely have to pedal. If only every day was like this...

And, if only every day you could meet a grumpy long-haired long-horned old goat by the side of the road, and feed him snacks! Check out the video:

Bread! Bread bread bread give me the BREAD. I am the goat, so bread is mine.

OOF! As soon as the goat realized Kerry had bread to feed him, he wriggled his way through the fence and jumped at her. Kerry's reactions are quick, so she fell backwards before the goat could make contact, and I grabbed one of his horns and held him in place. Kerry was back on her feet in a few seconds, no injuries.

It's a good thing that a goat's strength isn't proportional to his smell, or he would have been unstoppable!

"This is MY cabbage! Take a step near it and I will CLOBBER you!!"

When she saw us paying attention to the goat, the owner came out of her house with some cabbage we could feed him. She also told us a few stories about him. The general theme was: "Don't try to mess with the goat!" "Ouch, I got injured!" "Hey I warned you didn't I?"

It was a very lovely visit. But Hobbiton awaited! So we left the goat chomping cabbage and rode on.

The most important thing here is that you be alarmed!! (The details of the message can be buried in grass, for all we care...)

Even if the trees weren't trimmed this way, I'm sure the passing trucks would beat them into shape pretty soon...

Break time! Let's chomp some snacks and look at stuff...

The first highway sign pointing the way! Are you excited? I'm excited!

We made it to the visitor center, where we'll catch a shuttle into Hobbiton. Cloudy weather, but oh well. It'll still be awesome, even if the pictures aren't perfect.

The Hobbiton gathering area was awash in Japanese and Chinese tourists, each with approximately 3.5 cameras, including the obligatory cellphone screwed onto the end of a selfie-stick. I felt right at home among them, fiddling with my own avalanche of camera gear.

We took a look around in the gift shop but, to our surprise, there wasn't anything particularly special for sale. Lots and lots of t-shirts and exactly the same things you could buy online. I was hoping to find something novel to send to the nephews back home. Dang.

About half an hour later, we got in line, and were the first to board the shuttle. It glided across the road and over a hill, arriving at an official-looking gate.

One of our guides had to jump out and open it for the bus.

The sign reads, "before you dig, see site management."

Too late, maaaan, I'm already waaaaay digging it.

In case you're wondering, the electrified wires are to scare all the grazing sheep away. Nothing to do with corralling small children. Though I wonder... Do the Hobbits try to escape?

If it rains, they have an army of umbrellas standing by...

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy! (Can't you tell I'm excited in the picture?)

Here's the first thing you see stepping around the corner. The guide took one look at my Twoflower-style Hawaiian shirt, my huge camera, and my even bigger grin, and pointed at me and said "You. Go first." So I walked ahead of the group and got to stand and compose this nice shot with nobody in the foreground.

The perks of looking like a dork. Perhaps I reminded him of that dorky actor in the video that Air New Zealand shows you when you're preparing for takeoff.

We have arrived! The tour has begun!

Very excited photographer; can't decide what to point at first!

Check out this little video panorama Kerry made, to set the scene:

Lots of things to check out here!

Hobbiton is maintained like a farm. All the gardens are real, and all of the produce on display is grown from those gardens.

The attention to detail is very impressive, especially since all the plant life is genuine.

For example, the trees are all heavy with fruit this time of year, but you won't find a single one on the ground, since that would imply an absence of hungry hobbits. It really does feel like they all just stepped out of sight for a moment as you happen to be wandering through.

It's all just SO CUTE !!!!

This pond was here before set construction began. During filming, a handful of frogs moved in, and made so much noise they had to be relocated.

I've always enjoyed little self-contained idyllic scenes, left unpopulated, as though one could step inside them any time.

At times, this environment eerily reminds me of walking around the Santas Village amusement park, back in Scotts Valley in the 1980's...

... And at other times, it reminds me of a very old fantasy computer game called "Below The Root" that took place in a forest of enormous trees with houses built into them.

Every dwelling is decorated for a particular occupation and it's fun to guess what they are. See the drying rack on the right? Perhaps this is the local herbalist?

I really started to wonder... What would be the logistical problems of a dwelling built into a hillside, instead of over it? Would you have problems heating the place? How would drainage and insulation work? And since I'm from California, how would it fare in an earthquake? (Very badly, I suspect...)

And yet, with all these drawbacks... Wouldn't it just be SO CUTE ???

Just think, you could grow produce on your outside walls, as well as your roof!

It's amazing how much variety the designers managed to cram into such a small chunk of land.

It looks appetizing... But this bread is made from colored cement! Sits out here all year-round.

In fact, it's a pretty close rendition of Terry Pratchett's "dwarven bread".

This is new wood decorated too look aged, using a combination of yogurt, wood chips, vinegar, and paint.

I've no idea if this is actual honey, but I assume it is, since there were actual bees crawling around on the jars.

I'd say these were supposed to be beehives, but elsewhere in Hobbiton is a beekeeper's house with some boxes out front that have removable sections of honeycomb. So... If not beehives, what are these? Bird houses? Special hives for Middle Earth "giant bees"?

Hobbits need to build better ladders if they're going to avoid injury!

More fabulous framing by Kerry.

The central Hobbiton attraction: Bilbo's house!

We made sure to take plenty of photos around it.

The other big attraction was the Green Dragon Inn, where the tourguide invited us to sit down and have a drink. We had the cider and the ginger beer, then mixed them together. The result was fantastic!

Here we are, basking in the warm glow of Hobbiton!

Check out all that fancy design work!

Hobbiton was gorgeous, and worth the price of admission. And for us, it was the high point of a lovely day spent riding through the same scenery that encircled the attraction for miles around. I think it would have been a lesser experience taking a car here. But I've been a bike snob for most of this century, so of course I would think that.

On our way back to Tirau and our hotel we were already plotting about the next visit, and what our nieces and nephews would think!

Bursting into song about the wonders of New Zealand.

"The Russian fort is woody / In this town that's full of goodies / The butterflies, they flutter by / And farts come from their bootys"

Not bad for a first draft? At any rate, it is conclusive proof that I am 100% CLASSY.

Here's more evidence! (Gator #1 invited Gator #2 in for tea, but it was a TRAP!)

Anyway, the reason I'm all dressed up in sun-protective gear is because Kerry and I bicycled over to the Hamilton Gardens to spend the first half of the day snapping photos, disturbing insects, and bothering waterfowl, such as these:

That's a cicada skin, left behind on the underside of a leaf after the insect molted and crawled away. And of course, a duck, being ducky.

Hamilton Gardens was, and is, an amazing place to be a photographer. You're probably saying, "but I can see gardens all over the world; why would I want to waste my precious time in New Zealand walking around a garden?"

Perhaps some of these pictures will help explain why!

The place is a feast for the senses, and that feast has multiple courses. There are themed and curated gardens, kept carefully behind partitions, and large open sections that grow a little more improvisational and merge slowly across each other.

(You're probably looking at those pictures of thistles and saying, "he totally cranked up the saturation. There's no way those colors are real." Nope. That's how they looked, my friend!)

We didn't pay much attention to the signposts, and just wandered around. I have no idea how many of these plants are native to New Zealand, or even to the same hemisphere.

The Monarch butterflies were familiar, though! I grew up in a town called Santa Cruz, and during part of the year we could see them hibernating at Natural Bridges State Beach. (Check out this Forestry Service article about their migration routes.) Monarchs were brought to New Zealand from North America, and seem to have a pretty good foothold here, despite the cold winters.

They were very busy drinking nectar, so as long we we didn't interrupt them, it was possible to get incredibly close. Check out this iPhone video:

Now that is close! By the way, that loud hissing sound you hear is the cicadas, scattered throughout the foliage and talking to each other. It's intense, but after a while it fades into the background and you stop noticing it.

It makes me wonder: Do New Zealanders travel to places like North America and walk into the redwoods, and get disoriented because the forest is so very quiet?

The birds let us get pretty close too.

Anybody know what kind of bird this is?

That's me trying to blend in with the local foliage!

OAKTOWN REPRAZENT IN DA FOLIAGE YO.

One of the newer exhibits was this tudor-accented topiary, groomed into precise tessellations, and decorated with carvings of mythic creatures and gods.

I think some of the carvings were deliberately made to look deranged, or cartoonish, to evoke Lewis Carroll's poetry. I mean, look at that basilisk thing. Is it menacingly reptilian? Or adorably dopey? I can't decide.

And of course, what mythic garden would be complete without Pan, frolicking in the bushes? (Trying to track down a nymph no doubt.)

Elsewhere in the gardens, the Lewis Carroll influence was obvious!

The heat from the gravel and stones in this particular garden was mesmerizing, and the desire to sit down on that bench and lose a few hours was intense. The place had a sense of comfortable timelessness to it, like it would remain early afternoon for as long as you cared to linger there.

By contrast, the "productive" garden area - full of edible plants, and decorated with signs discussing composting and suggesting recipes - brought feelings of growth and renewal. Everything in it looked like it was just about to be pulled up and chopped into a salad bowl, or stirred into a stewpot. Mmmmm!

It looked delicious and I caught a few fellow tourists reaching into the exhibits and plucking out onions, or tomatoes, or peas, and sneaking them furtively into their pockets or mouths.

Even the things that weren't technically edible looked delicious.

Doesn't that flower just look good enough to chomp? (As an aside, I'm very pleased with the framing of this photo. It's on par with the framing that Kerry manages to get almost all the time. I don't know how she does it...)

Azolla: Free-floating water ferns! They contain a nitrogen fixing bacteria (Abaeberia azollae), and can be used as a mulch on the garden, or as chicken feed. Azolla grows rapidly and is a pest to lakes, ponds, and waterways, so it needs to be contained - like in this bathtub - for garden use.

The "productive" area was even more saturated with insects than the other gardens.

Among the "productive" gardens was one of more local origin called the Te Parapara Garden. Here's me pretending to be one of the wall carvings.

Dig this: Te Parapara was originally the name of the pre-European Maori settlement in what is now the centre of Hamilton Gardens!

The section is part tribute, part reference, and has two sub-sections, one presenting the uncultivated food the Maori gathered from the forest and grassland, the other presenting the system they developed for organized farming of these and other tropical crops in a sub-tropical climate. When Europeans showed up in the 1840's, this system was well-established in plantations all over the islands.

Speaking of tropical, another highlight for us was the tropical-themed garden. 200 different species of plants, according to the documentation, hardy enough to be grown outdoors but still giving the appearance of the tropics.

The colors were intense, and many of the plants had a thickness and stiffness to them that made the garden feel as much like a sculpture or a carving than something grown from the soil.

I wonder what it would take to grow these in my back yard? I have a bunch of succulents there already - perhaps it's time to add to the collection when I get back home?

Even the doorways were interesting here...

...And each of them led to something new and unique, like this Italian Renaissance-themed garden with many pockets and sections to explore.

Having so many distinct styles so close together, but confined to their own sections, appealed to my OCD nature. It was like browsing a collection of trading cards or figurines neatly organized on a shelf. Sharpened borders, matching sizes, and no intermediate space becomes just as important a part of the structure as the content itself.

I assume this is why most of my plants back home are in pots. They're all together in the garden, but they're also distinct and - in a very real way - protected from one another. Plants will happily fight to the death for root and sun space, and I don't want to lose any "weaker" species to "stronger" ones. I gotta catch 'em all!

Perhaps this is why I was so impressed by the Victorian Flower Garden:

All the plants seemed to be co-existing, even though they were placed together in what looks like a big tangle. I assume this is a combination of careful selection and careful grooming.

The effect was lovely, and the open setting - colorful and layered without being overwhelming - made this garden my favorite, slightly outranking the Tudor garden with the weird topiary.

We both wanted to stay longer, but we had a bus to catch. There were three or four sections that we just didn't have time to see. It would also have been nice to set down a little picnic blanket and have lunch somewhere. Nope! Got to get going.

There is so much of New Zealand to see - including dozens of things Kerry and I already know about and deliberately decided to skip - that it's unlikely I'll ever return to the Hamilton Gardens to finish my tour. Plus, the sections are always in flux - their contents are literally growing. A return visit would not be a return to the same sights as before. So if you think you can skip it just because you've seen my pictures, well, it just ain't so!

Kerry and I returned to the Albert Court Motor Lodge and fetched the rest of our luggage from the garage near the office, which the clerk had graciously let us use for our visit to the gardens. A while after that we were riding the bus out of town, towards Tirau. This would provide us a flatter approach to Hobbiton than the route we'd originally planned.

Tirau turned out to be a collection of shops strung out along Highway 1 where it briefly merges with Highway 27 and Highway 5, with a few motels scattered in like eddies in a river. Like speedboats in that same river, big trucks would come roaring up and down the highway through town at all times of day or night, with little regard for pedestrians or the wake of noise they left. We went out for dinner and watched them zooming by as we ate.

Out of curiosity, Kerry bought a popular local drink, called "L&P". Kiwis think this drink is awesome, but to us it tastes obnoxious. We've decided the "L&P" stands for "Lemon and Puke".

Our motel room reeked so much of cigarettes that we had to keep the windows open and even move the bed closer to the windows, but at the same time the noise from the trucks was punishing. Sleep wasn't easy.

But who cares! Today was amazing, and tomorrow we're going to Hobbiton!

Even without the reconfiguring, our schedule always included one very long bus ride from Waipu down to Hamilton, so we could get off the northern peninsula of the island and reach the interior, close to the Hobbiton movie set. Kerry and I had to see Hobbiton, of course. If we went all the way to New Zealand and then skipped it, we would be beating ourselves with sticks at the end of the trip -- and when we got home our friends would probably beat us with sticks too. And it would serve us right! Hah!

We got up with plenty of time to spare before the bus, and packed the bikes up lazily. We both knew we'd just be going half a mile and then re-packing them underneath a bus. In seven days we've had to switch our gear between planes, a kayak, bicycles, hiking trails, a boat, a shuttle, and a bus, with four hotels and a post office in between. Sometimes it feels like it's the gear that's on vacation, and we're just chaperoning it along. "Here, let me fluff that pillow for you, camera. Is that seat comfortable enough, repair kit? Be sure and give me a good Yelp review after your trip."

(As an aside, it's day 7, and we've already been personally reminded by employees at two establishments to go online and review them on Yelp. That service has quite a foothold here, I guess.)

The bus churned and rumbled way, waaay up into the hills along Highway 1. We never even considered cycling on this part of the highway, and I was very glad for that. We could have been squished by this very bus! I dashed back and forth between the windows on either side, giddily snapping photos, but afterwards I looked at them and almost none were usable. I was countering the motion blur by shooting at 1/8000-second, relying on the amazing sensor in the camera to keep the photos from being grainy, but every time I saw a pretty scene at the roadside it flew out of range before I could compose the shot. I am spoiled by bike touring in multiple ways.

I caught a few interesting things, but after an hour or so I just put the camera away and chatted with Kerry, and then listened to The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents while she took a nap. I've discovered a third thing that causes her to instantly fall asleep next to me: Riding a bus. The first two are watching tv, and reading fiction out loud to her. (Non-fiction doesn't seem to work.)

After many hours, we arrived in Hamilton, and set out to accomplish the day's mission: We were going to visit Diesel, the Rototuna Countdown Cat. Yes, that's right, we've traveled thousands of miles around the curve of the Earth in order to roll up and visit a cat that lives in front of a supermarket. We're perverse individuals that way.

We had to ride pretty far north from the bus stop - also the opposite direction from our booked hotel - to get to the right Countdown supermarket, and when we got there, one of the clerks told us that the owners of Diesel had in fact moved away at the end of last year and taken the cat with them. This was pretty disappointing, but the side-trip turned out to be worthwhile, because the very same shopping center had a pet store in it with another kittycat wandering around outside!

"Welcome to the shop! My name is Ginger Boy! I'll show you around."

"These are some of my favorite things! Actually, everything in here is mine, and it's all my favorite! Let me show you more!"

"Welcome to my apartment! My best favorite thing, is the food thing. Now you pet me while I eat, and that's two favorite things at the same time!"

(Nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom.)

"Then afterwards, we sit and watch the Zebra Finches! If you want one, they're only five bucks each." (Ginger Boy was right, they're fascinating. I took a short movie of them darting around.)

After that visit, Kerry and I ate some mediocre fush'n'chups and cycled back across town to the Albert Court Motor Lodge. Hobbiton was only two days away, but before that we were going to explore the Hamilton Gardens! Fancy stuff! But before that: Lots of sleep.

We got a decent amount of sleep, and it was all downhill into central Whangarei to catch the shuttle directly to Waipu. This would mark our first diverging from the schedule we'd meticulously prepared over the previous two months. We would be skipping the Waipu caves and their dark ceilings, sparkling with glow-worms, but we would also be skipping another several thousand feet of hills, as steep as the ones that punished us on that first day of riding. Now we knew our limitations, and we knew this was a necessary change.

The bicycles fit sideways into the luggage compartment under the bus without any acrobatics, and we piled our bags around them, except for our backpacks which we were too paranoid to relinquish. My rough estimate is that we were carrying about $11000 worth of gear in those backpacks, mostly in the form of camera lenses. That's pretty absurd, especially since we could have left half that gear at home and barely changed our enjoyment of the trip.

The green countryside scrolled by, and we found ourselves in Waipu before my stomach had a chance to notice it was on a bus and get upset - a childish behavior that it picked up years ago when I was riding commuter shuttles to work. We stepped off into an early autumn day with a fresh breeze and just a hint of ocean salt, and a few minutes later we had our gear reassembled and were riding back down the main street of Waipu, looking for our hotel, and for a place to get snacks.

The motel room was cheap, but dingy and cramped. The single-pane window opened directly onto a parking space. All the usual hardware was stacked in a corner - television on top of VCR on top of mini-fridge, unplugged and dusty. We stripped the bikes down, hauled the bags inside, then hauled the bikes in after. The room was now incredibly cramped, but we didn't care - it was time to go out and get snacks!

The restaurant across from the hotel was excellent. Actually, it was as good as the hotel was bad! We ate burgers and salad, and drank cider at a spacious table. Encouraged by the weather, we decided to go out riding and see what else we could find. What we found was a pastoral paradise.

We rode out through a meandering patchwork of lush green fields, split by slow rivers along soft banks, and crisscrossed by dirt roads with deep ruts and high shoulders of tangled grass. Dark horses, cream-colored sheep, and speckled cows meandered around, nibbling on the grass or lounging in the sun, between fences of rusty wire and wooden posts. Across all this blew a steady coastal breeze, fresh but not cold, weaving into the trees and carrying the scent of the sea, and higher up, carrying along an army of fleecy white clouds, sailing like galleons in the sky. It was like riding around inside everyone's collective hallucination of the perfect day in the countryside. A living daydream, filling up every kind of sense.

It was a feeling like the one I felt in western Kansas, on a particular day when I was bicycling there three years ago. Not exactly the same; the Kansas air had been warmer, and pungent with the smell of old grass and wet soil. A Halloween smell. Waipu was bringing me a younger, lighter smell - something like Easter. Looking around, I would not have felt surprised to see little pastel eggs tucked into the hollows of trees, and peeking out from rabbit holes.

Savoring this vivid impression, I stopped by the side of the road and dug a chocolate bar out of my saddlebag. A hundred feet away, Kerry pedaled up to a horse behind a low fence, but it saw her coming and backed nervously away, intimidated by the combined size of bicycle and rider. Kerry chastised the horse for being a scaredy-cat, and giggled. "Silly horse," I said, talking casually over our headsets. "Doesn't it know that bicyclists always have snacks?"

Once again, all the effort of hauling these awkward bicycle contraptions around felt absolutely worth it. We were traveling within, not just traveling through.

We pedaled around the area north of town, then came back and made a left turn, headed towards the sea. The road curved around and undulated over a few gentle hills. Nothing intimidating like what we saw the day before, thank goodness. We stopped in a random spot, peed behind some the bushes, then flopped down in the grass and chomped through a bag full of bubble gum. This is how a day of cycling is supposed to go! Not a death march, but a long string of roadside picnics.

"I'm still getting used to the idea of spending an entire day riding a bike," Kerry said. "I mean, not pedaling the whole time obviously, but... It's strange being 'in transit' for so long, you know? I'm used to riding a bike to get somewhere. So I get this feeling of impatience, like, we should just never stop, and pedal hard, so we can hurry up and get to the next town, the next thing. But I know that's not the right way to think about it, so I'm pushing back against that idea in my head. That's taking effort, but I think I can get there. We'll see. Still, it's good that we're doing other stuff too and not just bicycling day after day like some of the trips you've taken."

"Yeah," I said. "I don't expect you to like bicycling as much as I do. You'd have to be as crazy as I am; and that's pretty crazy. But I'm really happy you're here with me."

"Awww," she said, and gave me a hug.

We rode on, and about a half mile later we rolled around a corner and found the water - a long shallow inlet with pasture on either side, sweeping out to connect with the deeper ocean, kinked by a few bars of white sand, and with a thin crest of surf sketching out the interface between the incoming waves and the receding tide. Just up from the shore on our side of the inlet was an old graveyard, the headstones bleached and weather-beaten in some cases and sharp and shiny in others, all behind a fence with a single strand of electrified wire strung along it in plastic brackets, to keep the cows from crapping on the dead. We parked our bikes and went strolling around.

You can tell we’re only out for the day because the bicycle in the picture is lacking about 40 pounds of extra gear!

Seeing this coastal graveyard and this blue ocean and these huge clouds brought a lot of other associations to mind. Some musical, some literary. Sting's "The Soul Cages" echoed through my ears. Fragments of poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson. Images etched into my imagination when I read "The Sea Wolf" in the 7th grade. I felt detached from my own era, but it wasn't a disorienting feeling; it was a comfortable one. This graveyard by the sea was telling me something.

"Here is an environment, a source of sensations, that you cannot make your individual stamp upon, no matter what you try. Even solid stone, etched with descriptions of who you were and what you did, and placed here, will simply wear away into an anonymous blob in a thousand years, and it will be millions more years before this place even begins to look slightly different, from exactly how it looked a million years before you passed through. Maybe the shoreline will have a different shape but it will still be the same shore. All the poems written, all the ships built and launched, all the perfect picnic days and garbage left behind in human history compresses down to a thought ... an afterthought, even ... and I could be anyone standing here. Or no one."

"But is that really true? Humans do have a collective impact, after all. In seven thousand years we managed to create the Sahara Desert from grassland, with help from domesticated animals. Some people say that 15000 years ago the Great Plains was forested and only became grass because humans kept setting fires. Others say the forest retreated naturally as the glaciers melted away. And, we're certainly good at mass extinction..."

Abruptly I realized I'd been staring at the same distant sandbar for an entire minute. I walked back to my bike and stowed the camera. Time to ride out for snacks!

Kerry chatted with a few people sitting around in lawn chairs, dangling fishing poles down into the water. They told her that if we wanted to swim at a proper beach, we should cycle only "a kilometer or so" down the road and we'd find one, along with a general store. That sounded good.

Of course, "a kilometer or so" turned out to be four or five miles. We were both rapidly coming to the conclusion that New Zealanders could not be trusted to give accurate estimates of distance. It's probably not Kiwis in particular, it's probably just people who drive cars and don't bicycle. Back home, most people have at least tried bicycling. In New Zealand, people ride mountain bikes on tracks, but touring seems to be strictly for tourists. The idea of using a bicycle to get from one town to another seems absurd to just about everyone we've talked to here...

Eventually we did find a nice beach, and a nice general store. Many snacks were snacked upon.

I've never seen such a perfect demonstration of a beach forming from millions of discarded shells!

We collected a bunch of them and took a few photos, then left them around for kids to find. No sense hauling them back to the hotel.

As the afternoon moved on to evening, the shadows got deeper and more lush. Even though we were riding back the way we came, along the same road, everything looked different.

Whenever the temptation came upon us to stop and eat a snack, or take a photograph, we just went with it. The landscape seemed to be taunting us to find the right collection of buttons and switches that would capture the perfect photograph. Vacation with gadgets! Fun stuff.

Even the clouds got in on the act!

When we got back to town, I felt hungry and Kerry felt tired, so she took a nap and I walked over to the same restaurant, and went though the day's photographs.

Kerry's nap didn't last long, though: A bunch of Waipu locals gathered in the pub to watch the latest cricket game. Their shouts and laughter went straight through the thin walls of the hotel. Minus one star!

In the original schedule, Waipu was just a handy town to spend the night after exploring the Waipu Caves, but it turned out to be a fun place to explore in its own right, and very restorative. Kerry and I went to bed feeling a lot more refreshed than we'd been the previous night in Whangarei.

Good thing too, since the next day we'd be stuck in shuttles for six hours!

To get to the harbor we had to do an early morning ride, which was a lot more hassle than we expected due to the big hill between Matapouri to Tutukaka. A lot of tight curves, with no curb and almost no shoulder, and the two of us huffing and puffing at 3mph to climb our way up. On the positive side, the drivers were clearly doing their best to help. They would consistently slow down and give us most of the lane, swerving to the outside. It was nice to know they were allies.

Nevertheless, even the most polite driving can't eliminate that terrible feeling a cyclist gets when a two-ton metal monster is rushing up behind their back!

But we made it safely, stowed our bikes at the storefront, and walked onto the boat, ready for adventure! Here's a video of the journey out:

Whoo! Jumping into the water!

The Poor Knights Islands are pretty amazing, even if you're only experiencing them from slightly off the coast, which is uniformly steep and rocky. This is just as well, since the island group is a protected habitat, and the Department Of Conservation will fine you hundreds of thousands of dollars for merely setting foot on it - and far more if they catch you removing any of its unique species for sale on the black market.

Our boat dropped anchor about 100 feet from the nearest rock wall, and we got a polite but firm lecture on what we were allowed to do: Scuba, snorkel, swim, and paddle, but don't touch anything, and definitely don't pick anything up. We could dig it! The only thing we planned to take was awesome video!

I hadn't been snorkeling in many years, but it came back to me easily. Ever since splashing around in the pool as a child, I've always been more comfortable slightly under the water - pretending I was a submarine - than on top of it. And for ten bucks each, Kerry and I got wetsuits, making the water feel nice and comfy.

Handy tip: Cold wetsuit? Empty that bladder! Aaaaahhhh. It only feels unsanitary if you forget that most of our sewage ends up in the ocean anyway...

There were a few sea-caves within swimming distance. Dark, angular, foreboding holes in the rock, sucking in rivers of seawater and then spitting them out. I ventured inside one for a few minutes, swimming with the current and then bracing myself against a rock when the current reversed, so I could keep my progress. It was like being inside a slow-moving mosh pit: Every second you think you're going to get slammed against something, but the current surges with you, up against the obstacle, turning the impact into something less dangerous.

I didn't stay for long, since it was too dark to see much, but before I left I pointed my mask down and saw a group of scuba divers, creeping along the bottom of the cave with a flashlight. The water was much calmer down there - no current to jostle them around. Maybe I'll learn to scuba some day, and do the same thing? I hear the Monterey Bay back home has some great stuff...

The sea critters were delightful. I wanted to follow every fish I saw and tickle it! But even more interesting was the vegetation. Since we were right up next to an island, the water would slosh back and forth in long, languid motions like the sway of a gigantic pendulum, causing me and everything else around me to move gently within it. It created a kind of optical illusion, where all the rocks of the sea floor and the wall were moving, but all the long tendrils of seaweed that drifted out from them were standing still, with the fish and myself suspended nearby. The entire world was weaving dangerously around, but this little bubble of space was perfectly calm.

The temptation to swim over the top of a big crusty rock and just hang there, undulating in perfect sync with a curious little cloud of fishes, was very strong. We only had a few hours to explore a wide area, but I couldn't resist just hanging out for a while, at least a few times. Chillin' with my fish, yo. What an amazing experience.

Back on the boat, with our wetsuits off and our regular clothes back on, our next amazing experience was a sea cave, called Rikoriko. The guide claimed it was the largest sea cave in the world, but I honestly have no idea how accurate that is. It was a spectacular sight in any case - weird stuff growing from the ceiling, flickering lights reflecting from the water and dancing across the walls, long reverberation trailing every sound...

Here's a video of the tourguide putting more accurate numbers to the size of the cave.

And here's what I saw when I took a glance at the ship's console:

When we entered the big cave, the GPS signal went dead. Awesome! WE'RE LOST!

After the cave, we spent some time motoring around and between the islands, while the guide gave a history lesson, including a few different versions of the story behind the name "Poor Knights". My favorite version is that when Captain Cook first saw the islands in 1769, the native bushes were all in bloom, creating a reddish fringe all along the top that reminded him of a traditional seafaring meal called a Poor Knight's Pie. He had been sailing for quite a while at that point, so he'd probably eaten one recently, because the main ingredient of a Poor Knight's Pie was old moldy bread. The ship's cook would fry it up and spread jam on it, creating a greenish-brown slab with a reddish fringe. It must have looked just like a little island on the captain's plate.

Ah, the life of the sea! There wasn't any Poor Knight's Pie on our boat, but they did provide hot drinks, instant soup, and several big pyramids of pre-made sandwiches. I was feeling very hungry, and even though the sandwiches had wheat in them, I figured, "hey, it's been a long time since I felt a reaction to wheat, maybe my body is past it now?" So I grabbed three or four of them at least - probably more - and devoured them.

Here's a hyper-speed tour through an arch during our last few minutes at the Poor Knights islands:

After that we motored back to the harbor. Kerry and I were not looking forward to another round of cycling, and we were also feeling the subtle onset of "land sickness", which is a kind of reverse sea-sickness that creeps up on you and makes you dizzy when you get off a boat. It made me think of all those old cartoons I've seen where sailors weave around on dry land as though they're perpetually drunk. I wonder how much of that stereotype - of sailors as drunks - was established just from watching them try to deal with this unanticipated problem, or the more serious long-term version of it, a debilitating psychosomatic disorder known as "Mal de debarquement"?

Even though we weren't feeling our best, we managed to get ahold of a shuttle driver who was between jobs, and convinced him to carry us and our huge awkward bicycles down the highway for half an hour to Whangarei. We had to stack the bicycles on top of the empty rows of seats, so it was a lucky coincidence that none of the seats were booked except for one, and that passenger graciously agreed to ride up front with the driver. It rained a little during the drive, making Kerry and I feel extra grateful we weren't out there pedaling. We made sure to leave a generous tip.

We checked in and scattered our gear around the little detached cottage, and flopped down on the bed. It would have been nice to sleep the rest of the evening away, but we needed dinner. At least we had plenty of food choices nearby. I located a thai restaurant only a few miles from the hotel and we crept reluctantly back onto our bikes.

Just outside the hotel we stopped to admire the Whangarei Falls, and I got a nice shot of a parasitized tree. It was my first up-close look at one, and I found it fascinating - more so than the waterfall, which was crawling with tourists.

Half a mile later, the road went sharply downhill. Every foot of descent was another foot we would have to climb back up on the return journey, and as the bicycles plummeted, my stomach did too. I was exhausted. I knew Kerry was even more exhausted, and already stressed out from riding too much over the last three days. She was not enjoying the trip right now, and it was all my fault for underestimating the New Zealand hills, and she was going to be angry with me for accidentally leading us down yet another one. I just knew it. At the bottom of the hill I slowed to a crawl, and still it seemed like a very long time before Kerry caught up. We rode the rest of the way to the restaurant in bleary silence. I felt panicky, and depressed, and altogether much more upset than I could remember feeling in a long time.

There was a bus stop nearby, and I stared at the schedule with the faint hope that we could ride a bus back up the hill, but it was too late at night. We locked our bicycles and shambled into the restaurant. I ordered the food. Kerry excused herself to the bathroom, saying she needed some time alone, and was gone for so long I began to get worried. I stacked our luggage up underneath the table and went looking for her. Each bathroom was enclosed behind a lockable door, so I knocked on the one that was locked, and she let me in. We both sat on the floor for a while, arms around each other, nauseated and tired.

We talked, and I told her what seemed to be going on with me: I was having a wheat reaction. The first one I'd had in a year at least, and it was no coincidence that I was having it on the day I'd decided to believe I was "cured" of that problem, and eaten a huge amount of bread. I was obviously not "cured". All the usual signs were there, chief among them the intense, sudden feelings of depression, plus the elevated heart rate, the double-rings under the eyes, and the total inability to calm down or think clearly. A kind of free-floating panic attack that doesn't stop. When it's especially intense, all you can do is lay on the ground and let time pass. Your rational mind knows that it's possible to stand up, but the panic is like a hot coal, burning the line between your head and your legs.

Kerry was dealing with her own panic attack, brought on by land sickness, hunger, and fatigue. She was upset about the hill, but not upset with me. It had been her choice to let me set the pace, and her choice to continue on it, and she told me so. We were both in bad shape but we were also both more interested in reconciliation than in conflict, and that was a big help. Eventually we got to our feet together, and when we walked out of the bathroom we found our food waiting at the table, and we sat down and devoured it. It was delicious. We stuffed ourselves and slowly began to feel a bit better.

I hauled out my phone and poked at Google Earth and other mapping tools for a while, and found an alternate route back up to the hotel that made the ascent much more slowly than the huge, steep hill we'd gone barreling down. We packed up plenty of leftovers and set out feeling much calmer. The night air and the lack of traffic helped as well.

It took about an hour to get home, but we chatted on our headsets the whole way. I told Kerry an improvised story about a weasel and a beaver who learned about each other through a newsletter, and had to fight off a bunch of romantic rivals to track each other down. When we reached the hotel we were both in much better spirits.

While unloading the bikes, we saw a huge orange cat and had to take a few pictures, even though we were tired!