Sam's Blog

Here’s a wise fella I met on the road. I asked him why it rained so much in New Zealand, he said if it didn’t rain then the place wouldn’t be so green. Which makes sense… thanks Mr Donkey.

Why couldn’t I go somewhere other than New Zealand where there are not as many hills? Somewhere that I wouldn’t need to carry a tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat and the kitchen sink. I could be having breakfast at a market stall in Thailand before cruising down to the next town to stay at a very reasonably-priced hotel and then flip-floping down to the night market for some Pad Thai and mango pudding.
Oh well, better keep pushing.

The road is flat, the wind is at your back and the weather is perfect. But beware o cyclist, the bicycle gods like to soften you up before they throw in a couple of 3km badly-engineered climbs! (or maybe I am just out of shape. )

I will have to keep these message short since I am typing them on the mobile.
To escape the city, catch a train or ferry, except in Holland of course. New Zealand can be windy at times for a cyclist but it also has lots of hot springs so at the end of the day things even out.

Here is a photo on the way to Melbourne Airport before the nightmare started. Nine hours later and I am still in Melbourne because Qantas didn’t have any bike boxes and sent me to Virgin who wasted a lot of time and by the time the bike was boxed they said it was too late to check in. And then they wanted to charge me $200 for excess luggage, oooh how I hate airports!

I am off to the North Island of New Zealand for a month of cycling. I am going to test posting to the blog via a video mobile and I have also added a new menu above called “NZ Trip Progress” which will display my progress as I get to internet cafe to update things. Lots of last minute things to do, so I better get to it!

Just finished updating the Europe Cycle Tour, drawing the route that we took using GPX Draw and using a combination of the gpssave gallery2 module and also some perl scripting to position the photos in the right spots on the map.

Click here to have a look:

That was the last of the cycle tours to convert for Google Maps, it has been a challenging project, I have had to learn a couple of different API’s, programming languages and developing new modules for Gallery2 but I think it has all been worth it. I like how I can have a overview of all the tours and the cycling stats shown graphically.