Roads I Love!

Here we are blessed with a huge variety of roads, pancake flat, lumpy, long steady hills, scenic, hard pinches to grunt over, walls to chew handlebars on and a few soul testing climbs that inspire respect always. It's easy to complain that we don't have the Alpine passes of Europe, the lung searing climbs of the USA, the bergs and cobbles of Northern Europe. What we do have is variety. I could think of nothing worse than riding day in and day out in the American mid-west, endless flat, windswept roads.

The hard thing about riding here is to decide where to ride. It's easy to fall into a rut and ride the same roads all the time. You ride them because it's easy, convenient, safe (those aren't mutually inclusive terms by the way), but it doesn't have to be that way.





Chris Tennent-Brown, as well as moonlighting as a Z grade celebrity, is an excellent urban pathfinder. He has a 1 hour loop, The Nutcracker Suite, that will make your knees tremble and your bike creak. This whole loop is within 4 kms of downtown Auckland, is safe to ride almost anytime of day and can't be ridden in the wet (Unless you want to risk a testicle/top tube interface). The climbs are mostly short, but intensely steep, greater than 20%, and there are several sections that require a modicum of confidence and bike handling ability.

As per my last post, I love unsealed roads, and while the Rodney District Council do their best to reduce the amount of this pleasure available to me, they are still about. They range from narrow, rough farm roads to smooth, wide forestry roads and they are all fun to ride.



Both north and south, there are hundreds of miles untrafficked rural roads, quiet and begging to be ridden, have a look at a map, plot out a route, take some cash, go and get lost, come home happy.