Hanne

My sister bought a Tardis just before Christmas. Full size, complete with flashing blue light on top. She plans to place it outside the door to our house, so the illusion of smallness may be contradicted by the expanses behind. Mum secretly hopes it will work to revert the forces of entropy that always seem to infiltrate our bedrooms. She will go on hoping.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t think Stephen and I need a Tardis. We seem to be followed around by a permanent vortex of watch-warpingness as it is. Whenever we go anywhere it is always necessary to calculate the longest possible time it could take to get there, multiply it by half again and maybe add another 20 minutes on top just for leeway. Some call it SMC time, others like me can trace it back through generations so assume the trait to be genetic. Whatever the cause, this effect was in full swing as we made our way from Whangamata to Taupo on the 27th of December for the Taupo Road Race Spectacular.

Our plan was to ride down, meet Danae and Andrew, and camp the night in our brand new tent, hopefully without having to test the waterproofness of the whole ensemble! With our matching yellow Dunlop hats (courtesy of BRONZ) we knew we would fit in perfectly. We left Whangamata around 11, had a clean sweep through Karanagahake gorge and managed to maplessly find our way to Tirau. So far so good. I sure was glad we were hading west as we left Paeroa though, as the queue of traffic heading the other direction was banked up for a good 5km! I have never seen the town so chaotic on a weekend on a street-raceless weekend.

The bike’s suspension sagged a little under the weight of two full bellies as we headed on to Putaturu and Taupo but she soon got revenge through the dreaded ‘aching of the knees’. Once more the pillion fell into the clutches of the dreaded ‘fire of the joints’, and boy was I glad to reach Taupo! Stephen ducked into the Supermarket to buy some tinned food as camping was free in exchange for food for the foodbank. Then the maths graduate came out and relaised that ‘3 cans of food’ probably applied to each person, and that 3x2 is in fact 6, so it was my turn to peruse the New World aisles.

Despite managing to take a good 4 ½ hours to travel to Taupo, we did arrive at the racetrack in time for the end of the 3 hour endurance race. Those guys are legends, and this view was confirmed by examining their tyres at the end of the event. Many of them looked as if they ad just limped away from a fight with a lawnmower and come out second best! It was good to be there for the end of the race and cheer on Chris, who ended up coming a respectable 12th. I also managed to track down the man in charge of food donations, who informed us we were a good 3 hours too late for the Salvation Army. He took our food anyway, promising to deliver it the next week, so we could calm our troubled souls.

We actually started to think that Andrew and Danae might be in trouble when it started to get dark and the pair, who had left Auckland at midday, were still nowhere to be seen. It turns out they had taken a map, which was their first mistake! Stopping off at Matamata and Otorhanga along the way, they had taken the most zig zag route possible. And then managed to nearly run out of gas. Sigh! Not to worry, both arrived intact, panniers bulging, vowing to never again trust any kind of bibliographic navigational device.

Everything seemed to fit very well into two panniers and an empty looking tank bag. Suspiciously well, in fact. It was then we found out that they had neglected to bring a sleeping bag or tent fly, as these were deemed too bulky. And I thought Stephen’s packing rules were harsh! Taking a look at the raincloud sitting very low to the left, Danae and I made a quick dash into town on a food and tarpaulin hunt. And that is how the SMC came to possess a $40 scout tent, on sale at the Big Red Shed. The club is really going up in the world!

We returned two-up bearing quick cook 5 minute pasta, a bottle of wine for the girls and a six pack for the lads, who were looking very busy around the meths burner and grunting manly things, as one should at a race track. Here I might add that it is a very good idea to check the level of meths in your meths bottle BEFORE lacing on n adventure. Otherwise 5 minute pasta takes exponentially longer… Not to worry, we had the DR sitting by with a near full tank of gas. So we hooked up a tube to the overflow, all ready to milk. Just for in the unlikely event of a culinary emergency! Although the DR gas was not needed in the end, we did find out the next morning how dual-purpose the DR really is. The seat makes an excellent breakfast table!

‘Early’ is not usually a word that coexists with ‘holiday’, but the prospect of witnessing a dozen or more motorcyclists cycle a track in full leather proved enough to rouse us the next day. It would be worth competing in an event proper just to have a shot at the $100 bicycle challenge! The other highlight of the day was of course the sidecars. Several amazing passes had us biting our nails, and the boisterous relatives of one swinger on our left also livened things up! It was around the time the sidecars came in that the rain came down, so the $40 tent became a four-man superman cape, shielding us form the weather. Four spectacular crashes later, the F3 riders were all called in and seemingly given a bollocking. Apparently it is not a good ides to stand dazed in the middle of the track after you crash. You might get hurt. And wets are also good in the rain. Due to the fickle weather, the guy with a tyre changer on the back of his truck must have been making a killing! $10 a tryre adds up…

I should also add that I am not a very good spectator. I like to be in on the action, whatever that action may be, so next time I hope to either be on the track in a bucket class or working as a flag marshal. I find that things are always far more fun when you have a task to do and are involved in events. But this was a good start! (And if anyone is ever looking for a swinger, I’m just a PM away ….. :P)

Midway through the afternoon it was of course time to pack up, and now I come back to the tardis. I am familiar with this concept through the use of panniers. Things fit ok when you pack them at home, but as soon as they come out again they pretty much double in volume and there is no way they will go back in. Luckily I was able to make use of Andrew’s empty tank bag when my jacket lining and the shoe-sized tank pannier refused to cooperate!

The ride back to Whangamata was plenty of fun. Despite the wet weather and the fact that this song was stuck in my head the entire way (I even made up a whole series of actions to be performed by a pillion whilst traveling at speed), two things made the trip. The first was the man who served us at Subway in Tirau. There was no confusion over whose sandwich was whose with labels such as ‘Hondaaaaaaaaaaar’ ‘DRRRRRRRR’ and ‘Tunaarrrrrrrrrrr’ adorning the wrappers. The tyre pressure diagram in Paeroa (pictured) was also pretty neat.


We finally reached the gate to my Grandparents’ farm at around 8pm, only to find the gate to the forestry road they live down firmly shut. With a hoofing great chain. Time for some offroad! The DR was really in its element, and I actually took photos to prove this incident happened, lest it go down in the annals of history as a myth such as UFO sighting or safety ratings on open face helmets. Stephen had to maouevre around a bike trap to get in, but luckily for us someone else had done the hard work of filling in a bridge. 15 minutes later we arrived at the house, only to be told that the chain was just pretending. All if took was some unraveling, like a ball of twine. Fooled us! So I suppose that is Lesson Number Two: sometimes it pays to try the straightforward option first!

All in all our trip to Taupo was great fun, despite consisting largely of a long series of face palm moments! We were all very grateful for warm food and snuggly beds that night, and entropy did its things all over the floor when we opened our bags. Camping trip #1 can, I feel, be deemed a success, and I look forward to the next trip to somewhere more out of the way, and to hopefully soon joining in on some of the Taupo action.