Wellington South Coast

This blog post is out of sequence. I've got so many to catch up on, I had forgotten about this one.

On Monday 14 December, the day before we went on our ride with Pat (described below), John and I went for a ride on Wellington's South Coast. They say “you can't beat Wellington on a good day”. This was such a day.

We parked near Lyall Bay and rode along the foreshore. The sea was flat and a gorgeous colour.

Tapu te Ranga Island, off Island Bay (photo by John)

Part of our biking “ritual” includes stopping somewhere for coffee, and we pulled up at “The Bach” near Owhiro Bay, only to find that the front part of it was now just set up for meals, and was not offering counter food. But they had a new café, called “Whero”, at the back of the building. It is seemed a bit basic and multi-purpose – there were bikes to hire and a coffee roasting machine in the same space – but the coffee and cakes were good. Perhaps it's a work in progress.

Café Whero, at the back of “The Bach” (photo by John)

The coffee roasting machine (photo by John)

Being close to Christmas, there was a Christmas tree sculpture made of driftwood outside one of the houses along Owhiro Bay, which rather took my fancy.

A driftwood Christmas tree

When we got to the end of the road, we thought we would try riding on the track to Red Rocks. But we didn’t get very far. We pushed the bikes over a very sandy patch to get to the track, but that too, was quite unstable with large round gravel. So we turned back.

We tried the Red Rocks track, but the surface was too unstable (photo by John)

Instead of going back to Lyall Bay along the foreshore, we rode up Happy Valley Road. I have no idea where we went exactly – John has his inbuilt sense of direction, and I just follow … We went "over the hills and far away", then ended up behind the Zoo, and eventually came down Sutherland Road back to Lyall Bay.

Coming down Sutherland Road, back to Lyall Bay (photo by John)