Things don’t stop on a Sunday morning in Manakau, the boy racers keep racing. The “under the influence” people keep “undering” (the room next to ours in the motel was habited by the local meth dealer) but it was time to crack on out of Auckland!

We packed off, head to the supermarket to get more lemsip for James and lollies for me.

Leaving through Manukau was interesting. Really poor derelict looking houses then BOOOOM massive mansions with white picket fences and we were most definitely in suburbia.

We cruised through the park where there were lots of other weekend cyclists out enjoying the day, none of whom said hi. Miserable bats.

We stopped and met Adventure Kitty, who was the cutest little cat just cruising around the park living the dream. Quite enjoying tormenting all the puppies who were in puppy class having to sit still and behave.

We wiggled our way out of suburbia and bumped into two ladies who had also started the Tour on our day. One of whom I had met a few weeks previous whilst cycling to work and we chatted at the traffic lights then parted ways.

We reached a point where there were two possible routes to take depending on what the traffic was like. Either the nice scenic coastal route or the hilly inland route. Due to road works we got a little confused and the garmin route took us, of course the hilly inland route. At one point we were flying down a hill enjoying a well earned descent looking at some super cute llamas only to hear from behind STOPPPPPPPP, we’d missed the turning so had to reclimb the hill and turn off.

Eventually we made it to a little town called Hunua who had the best pies and we stopped for a little break.

Our bums and legs were starting to get tired, so we had planned to stop in Miranda at the hot pools and have an early finish and get a good nights sleep. We jumped onto the Huraki trail and grinded towards what we thought was Miranda. Turned out we had somehow managed to completely miss it and the garmin’s / the ladies from Wellington had mis-directed us again.

Instead of our nice and easy early finish we then agreed to crack on for another 30km and end in Puriri.

The hauraki trail continued. And Jesus Christ on a bike was it boring. Just gravel and straight lines around a river. The only perk was cows! Of course we had to stop and say hello.

The Wellington Ladies had arranged a night for us at a closed hotel that the owner had kindly opened up for us to stay. The owner was a lovely guy called Andy. He also took our dirty washing and cleaned it for us, and took us into Thames down the road to pick up Thai for dinner, in the zoopiest car I have ever been in!

James didn’t help things by asking “what’s the fastest you’ve ever got in this?” At which point he put his foot down and got to 150k I had to flick James in the ear to stop him asking stupid questions and getting us all killed!!!!

The adventure continues…