Shimmering and white

First up, deep, deep lust .

Ok, for those nervous that they'll click on the link and get another naked Milla or similar, that won't happen, this is completely safe for work, and won't have your non-riding workmates crowding around to perve, or asking you to forward the link...but hey! you never know.

Here's a few pics from the day after Saturday's epic, it dried quite hard.





Last up, The Mars Volta and The Horrors at the 2010 Big Day Out, what a curate's egg that is.

For those of you not familiar with either of them, here's a taste or two

The Horrors - Sheena is a Parasite


The Mars Volta - Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus Pt 1 (Live)

Doctrine of Misery

Sometimes it's the little things that count.

Mikeal, he of the glad-handedness, devised a plan of subversive suffering. This plan of his was fermented from the cosy warmth of his automotive and not while on two wheels. The plan was in equal parts sublime and stupid, as such it grabbed my attention. He proposed that we venture down to the Coromandel, ride the Tapu-Coroglen Road, then The 309 Road and ride back down the coast to the start point. A brilliant plan, with metal roads, the highest road crossing of the Coromandel and then one of the few roads in New Zealand that rental cars are banned from (along with The Ball Hutt Road and Skippers Canyon Road). This had my sort of silliness all over it.

A day was set, and we had a company of four, Doris, Mysterex (who was soon to go trans-gender and, additionally, suffer name reassignment), Mikeal and myself. Apart from Mikeal, who was on his cross bike, the rest of us were on road bikes.

The plan was that Mysterex would be collected by me, he and I would drive to Thames and then ride at pace the twenty kilometres to Tapu, to meet Mikeal and Doris who had driven to that point. We would then ride the loop and Mysterex and I would then ride back to Thames, leaving the others with ninety kilometres under their belts and Mysterex and I with one hundred and thirty.

The day dawned a little damp, and started, for me, inauspiciously, as I arrived to collect Mysterex in the pre-dawn to find him still deep in his scratcher. He arose, pronto and was shambolic. As we drove down the southern motorway I endured the soundtrack of clanking spoon and ceramic bowl and the stench of milk and weetbix as Mysterex inhaled his weetbix.

Arriving in Thames did little to assuage my concerns as to Mysterex's powers of organisation. There we met Mikeal and Doris, who were collecting packs and bottles from us before motoring on to Tapu. In very short order Mysterex had a pile of clothes spread across the road outside the Thames police station, was a half-dressed man, had a cell phone in the gutter and, horror of horrors, was going to ride a road bike with a saddle that could have served as a wharf buffer for the QEII. The saddle was round, white and had a cut out, it looked like it should have been bolted to a posh toilet.

At that stage, with a large and serious riding day, with no short cuts, Doris, Mikeal and myself all looking on bemused, Mysterex jumped aboard the bike with the plushly upholstered ring cushion, rode it in a couple of quick circles to test that it was up to the task and realised his seat was too low. Promptly he was renamed Sid, as in Ice Age, the enterprising sloth.

Sid was also concerned about the hygiene of the bladder of the camelback that Mikeal was lending him. Mikeal assured him that he'd cleaned it carefully with his bare hands. Sid was dubious. A quick reset, both bike and mental, a tidy up of the tornado strike and he and I set off up the coast to met the other two, who were motoring up to Tapu.

Thankfully things passed well from there. The climb up the Tapu road, through soft rain was the equal of any road I have ever ridden. Winding up through the mist, it was a road that is without equal. We stopped to visit a massive kauri, a short walk up some steep stairs, it did require a footwear change. It was here that we gained witness to, the now renamed, Sid's second satorial disaster. He had, in his rush, taken his wife's jandels. Let's just be kind and say, that apart from an urge to cross the gender divide, no man would ever slip those particular jandels on.
The kauri was magnificent, and well worth a visit, I would strongly urge all to go and visit it, it's majestic beauty made me all too aware of the things that I forget when I am in cities.

From there, we rode on climbing to the day's highpoint, and started the gradual, fasr descent towards the eastern side of the Coromandel. It was part way down this descent when we were witness to a moment from Doris that I thought was going to result in toy throwing. She was uncomfortable with descending the long metal section and not enjoying it one bit. Her face, when she caught up (Sid was still there with her, so not completely slow) was like she was chewing wasps, and petulance hung large in the air. Thankfully, it passed and the road flattened out. As always Doris soldiered on , and she did a helluva a lot better on the truly horrid descent of the 309 Road, which I hated.

After a small interlude of sealed road we were back on metal, and the 309 Road loomed. The valley is long and climbed gradually, then suddenly it pitched up and climbed in earnest. The surface, unlike the previous metal road, was soft and sapping. It was a damn hard climb up to three hundred metres. The descent was a little less fun than the last, and required a modicum of caution.

A brief stop at the cafe at the watergardens, letting Sid raid the cake cabinet and dispense knowledge to Canadian cycle tourists as where to purchase sheepskin saddle covers, and we were down to the coast again. Two painful climbs later, and a tail wind laid up nicely for us made the flat coast pass easily.

We all witnessed Sid's well developed grasp of technology. On the descent of the 309 Road, he suggested he ride ahead and take a video of Mikeal and myself descending the metal. Here are his three efforts, unedited and in full.







The upside of the ride is boundless, it was a challenging route that I'd recommend with a couple of caveats.
We were, to the best of my knowledge, the first to ride road bikes over the Tapu-Coroglen Road and the 309 Road. It is a hard ride, and the climbing on soft metal roads is sapping, but the rewards are well worth it. The caveats concern the amount of metal (45 kilometres), two long metal road descents and the lack of shops, provision or bail out points. It's not a ride for the unprepared, apart from Sid.
Like most metal roads, they are best to ride in spring, as the loose gravel has been pushed into the surface of the road. It's also not a ride for the unfit.
As such I can thoroughly recommend it, and truly hope that others will ride it, as well as follow Mikeal's lead and create, and share, damn interesting, well thought out rides.

Thanks Mike for the brilliant day out.

Going Begging

No, this is not the start of the Defy Evolution Classified, that will come when I have worked out the cunning way to clip the ticket.

Matt the Skirt Chaser, who has a reasonable stable of bikes, none of which are quite normal, but some are almost cool, has decided to part with his Ibis Silk frame. The reasons are multiple, and to the best of my knowledge don't involve a reticence to shave his legs or stop wearing dresses on bikes.

He did have grand plans to build up a nice rig with it, but it just isn't to be, so he feels the need to sell the essence of a nice road bike.

It is, as mentioned, an Ibis Silk SL, with an Easton EC90 fork, Cane Creek IS110 headset and Easton EC70 seatpost. It has a 53.7cm effective top tube, (suitable for smaller folk, hobbits and other woodland creatures) The bike is pictured above, and quite honestly, is far nicer in the flesh.

If you are interested, or know anyone who is, simply email me and I'll put you in contact with Matt.

This is a sad day, especially as he has yet to throw a leg over anything that would enhance his riding dignity for quite some time. Enough of me rubbing salt in his lash marks.

Hairshirt

Matt chasing a bit of skirt on Sunday morning.



From his photo blog, which if you ferret through my links you can find. Sadly he is living up to his link name.

The plans for this weekend's madness are coming along well, Mikeal has had a bit of biff from a four wheel drive door in the weekend, but that doesn't appear to be an impediment to the looming adventure.

This is the route, and yes, that is the 309 Road. I'm thinking, and my ego is sufficiently large already, that I'm going to be the first man to ride a regular road bike over the 309 Road. If this isn't the case please disabuse me of that notion. Mikeal will be on his cyclocross bike, with knobbly tyres. Me, just some 25mm regular road tyres. Upside of this is that he will be crying for mum by the time we hit the Thames Coast again. Downside is that I'm picking he'll sit on for all the seal.

I did engage in a little rig testing yesterday with Warren. We tackled Kiwitahi Road, then Inland Road. Both have unsealed sections of at least sixteen percent gradient, plus a miserable eight percent uphill into a howling Easterlie. The wind was sufficient to shake the road markers wildly and Warren reckons there should be some way of calculating wind effect on gradient, a little like windchill if you like. By his reckoning, the eight percent on gravel with headwind was more akin to a thirteen percent seal section.

Kiwitahi road is one of the more solid and constant climbs around, one and half kilometres with a ten percent average gradient. When it was entirely unsealed it was more a feat of concentration so steepness wasn't quite so apparent. Now that it is sealed almost to the top, it's true nature is apparent. The final two hundred metres are very steep, approximately sixteen percent and unsealed, that is the icing on the cake. Inland Road is just a beast, with very steep stairsteps and a short, very rough metal section, but popping out on the top in a familiar spot is truly rewarding.

Here's the profile Here's the route

http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/new-zealand/waitakere/880125351644027153

Have you passed through this night?

So, I got to hang out on the wharf today.



After The Mars Volta, here's something less exotic.

Explosions in the sky - The Birth and Death of the Day.

Screwed Corvette

Collected assorted and random thoughts. In no special order here's a cranial dump that's overdue.

This week has already had two nights of convivial company, plenty of food and wine. Well worthwhile in making the world a better place, and further embedding my view that community is far more important than most people care to recognise. Community, not a physical, singular spot but the enriching, caring, philosophising, burden sharing, humour dispensing place that we all require. The food and wine were a small blot in my carcass reduction programme. Thankfully the set screw I stuck in the dial of the scales is holding fast and my belt is fibbing. A small price to pay.

Sunday's ride was quite special, Huia return through French Bay, Laingholm, then out to be broken on the roads. The day was perfect for it, the company excellent and the pain dished out, sublime. Although the low flying, then waddling ducks on the descent down to French Bay were an interesting sideshow before the climbing fest. As always, the end of the seal at Little Huia provides a great place to pause and reflect, and yet again the scenery didn't disappoint. It's incredible that one can be less than thirty kilometres from downtown Auckland and it's a completely different world. Sleepy, rural, historic, almost forgotten, it's a place of magic.

Not far from there, on the treacherous Manukau Bar, in 1863 New Zealand's worst maritime disaster occurred. HMS Orpheus, a Royal Navy corvette on route to delivery supplies for troops engaged in the New Zealand Land Wars, hit the bar, foundered and sank. Out of a complement of 259, 189 crew died. The graves of some of the unknown can still be visited in the regenerating forest on the back of the Cornwallis Peninsula.

I'm pestering the Domestic Tyrant to get me a pass for Fashion Week. She has outfitted the Air NZ VIP lounge, and tomorrow I'm off to photograph that for her, but come the real deal, when models and celebrity will stride the room, sit on the chairs, lie on the beds, and I'm most likely to be banished. This is most unsporting behaviour from her. Just a little charity, that's all I suggest it is.

Mikeal, he of onanistic pride, and I are going to ride from Tapu over to Coroglen return next weekend. He will be on his cyclocross rig, and I will ride my road bike. Partly out of sheer perversity I'm going to ride the road bike, just to show that it can be done, plus I want to make him whimper when we do get back on tarseal. I am looking forward to the long, steep metal sections and giant, mature kauri.

On that note, I'm heading back to continue nagging about Fashion Week.

Sunday's Huia profile.

Butterfly

Most of the time Jorge the Malicious is grit in my chamois, but every so often he comes up trumps.
The above picture shown is in his words - "Attached is one of the first four pictures taken by Hubble since it was upgraded for the last time, on a servicing mission a month or two ago. The piccie is the Butterfly nebula. Another picture taken, in the infrared spectrum, shows a star forming at the center of the nebula, between the two wings.
How can a human top something like that?"

Ninjas

Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas.

This little phrase, that trips lightly from the tongue, is reportedly the longest palindrone in the english language.

After recounting my childhood, canned fizzy drink incident I started remembering other moments of prepubescent foolishness and idiocy. Some are amusing just to me, some are the usual fare of growing up and some did cause consternation.

I grew up in a rural environ, on a reasonable sized lifestyle block. We had a creek complete with brown trout, eels and koura, in the garden lurked bantams. There were, scattered around the property, dogs, a siamese cat, chickens, ducks, incredibly stupid pet lambs that became moron sheep who came to live in the freezer, bobby calves and steers, ponies and horses, and a dairy farm next door. In that space, and the neighbouring farms, I ran wild.

My cousin lived nearby and we engaged in the sort of scheming and activities that small boys thrive on. There was the creek to play in, along and on, trees to climb, bulls to be scared of, animals to wrestle with, cowpats to throw. In this sort of place you'd imagine that indoors was a place generally ignored. Most of the time it was.

My father had a large workshop, with a large bench, lots of woodworking tools and odds and sods. We were allowed to go in there, but there were very strict orders about the use of tools and what we could, or couldn't, use. The two of us generally only went in to try and better the home made boats that we raced down the creek.

One particular day we were bored, and spurred on by the looming April Fools Day, I hatched a plan to get the upper hand on my father. I was still smarting from the ignomy of the previous April Fools morning when my father had woken me to tell me that it had snowed heavily. I leapt from my bed and threw open the curtains to see this glorious white scene. But there wasn't any snow, not even a frost, nothing unusual at all, the lawn, trees and bushes looking exactly like any other early autumn morning.

In the workshop of my father one particular March day the plan took shape. As was the normal fashion, when either my cousin or I had a plan of mischief, the other participant was willing and enthusiastic, this time was no different. The plan was to glue various random off cuts of timber to the bench, maybe nail a few down as well for good measure as a strangely inept April Fools Day prank. This we did with a sixteen ounce hammer and a bottle of PVA.

We stood admiring our handy work, when I noticed the vice, a good woodwork vice, faced with timber. A lightbulb went off in my mind and I grabbed the PVA, squirted a decent amount onto the faces of the vice and wound it shut. Then we went back outside and carried on doing what small boys do with sticks and dirt and creeks.

April Fools Day passed uneventfully, nothing was said by my father and I didn't want to ruin the surprise. Days passed, then weeks, nothing was said. Time passed and my cousin and I moved on to new escapades and forgot about that act of devilry.

Some years later, maybe my late teens, at a family gathering, my father asked my cousin and I, in front of the assembled family, if we remembered all those years ago glueing timber to his bench. There was laughter all round, then he mentioned the vice, still laughing. He recounted how he had come to discover the crime, how angry he was, furious even, how he had to carefully cut down through the middle of the glued faces of the vice to be able to separate it and then remove and replace the glued, scarred faces. Then he saw the funny side of it, and decided he wouldn't give the culprits the satisfaction of knowing they had got one over him, so he stayed silent and we forgot until that fateful family gathering.

All well and good, except that he made me realise that I still hadn't got the upper hand in the April Fools Day battle. Never one to let sleeping dogs lie I fixed that score properly that next year, and, due to a happy coincidence, the particular stunt I pulled had an effect far greater than I ever envisioned. The outcome of this stunt was such that there have never been any further April Fools Day skirmishes from either side.

The stunt in question, I'll save that for another day.

Perfection

In response to Jorge the Perfunctory and his hectoring, as well as my own purely prurient interests, I bring you Mila Jovovich naked. Sorry Jorge, no rubber gloves.

Ahoy!

Fun for the whole family!
Have a look here for a new holiday idea.

Rubber Glove Seduction

Sometimes days beckon and a ride is ordered. On this occassion, several years ago, the weather was fair and the assembled company decreed that we should head south and tackle Ararimu Road and the Hunua Valley. There were four of us that day, The Reader from Mt Rascel, Mr Kerby, CTB and myself. In all, the makings of a good ride with a few laughs thrown in.
Normally I ride with the climbing prowess of a land anchor, but on this day CTB was midst sumo training and was a little more lardy than usual, so my grasp on the caboose was taken. Every time the road pointed skyward he would go to the back of the class, then get sent to the corridor.
At that particular time I was pretending to be scientific and analytical about my riding and had one of those infernal Polar Power Meter thingamees. At best it looked like someone had dropped a few extra cables and zipties on my bike and then tried to deny their existence. Looking back it wasn't the best piece of industrial design I've ever seen, and was nothing more than an ego caresser for me.
That particular day it did have a use. I was able to gauge the exact point when CTB would be sent from the class, one watt higher and he was adrift, so we rode all the climbs off my wattage and made gentle time. The ride progressed well, the day was balmy and the wind benign. Then we stopped at the Ardmore aerodrome and the strange little cafe there.
Conversation was quite civil, until The Reader from Mt Rascel started mentioning that he was now of an age that he needed a prostate check, to which CTB popped out with "A visit to Dr Jellyfinger!"
That set all of us off, there were tears of mirth and rolling around. The other elderly patrons wondered what these four lycra clad fools doing. A good ten minutes of my life disappeared. After the hysteria had dispersed we were finally able to remount and ride off, but the merest hint of anything rubbery for the rest of the ride and legs would be instantly weakened.
It is now a ride etched indelibly in my memory.
I'll post the route tomorrow.

Urbane Stupidity

Things are heating up, Jorge the Persistant has revealed that he's not in Texas at all. Migrating through the mid-west he causes destruction where ever he alights, he's like a one man locust swarm. Thankfully we have the Pacific between us and his goatlegs.


These pictures are an abbreviated pictorial essay on CTB and my urban rolling last night.












Thank you Sanai for the sensational Tempura!

Performance

Thanks Serge!

Hendy!

Henderson wins in the Vuelta!

View the last kilometre here!