Long track Nov6

[LB]

A great weekend. A wet ride up for me - left Wgtn 3pm Fri. Saw heaps of cops. Hamish left at 4pm and he had only some drizzle. Met up with Doug Green and Mrs DG and Kiwizrx in P/Nth.

Saturday dawned lovely and fine, it turned out to be real hot. Had breakfast, did the rounds of the bike shops. The bike show at the track was quite good, met up with lots of people we knew. Glad we had our grandstand seats for the racing, as we were in the shade. Saw The Yoshie at the bike show, and Slim, I saw you walking past the grandstand a couple of times. SparkyBills was on the Ducati stand.

The racing was really good, far more breakdowns than last year, and the final race was heartbreaking for poor Kelvin Tathum (sp?). Re-cycled stayed the night at our motel, and we had dinner with him and 4skins.

Good ride back Sunday, came via Palmerston North to have breakfast at the McCafe in Palmerston North. We had cloudy almost drizzly weather most of the way till halfway over Paekak Hill, when the blue sky came out. We headed north after Haywards and stopped at the top of the hill for a while and met up with Artifice on his travels from Chch, also met with crazylittleshit. MarkDunn: saw you heading towards the hill at Kaitoke.

Another great biking w/end.

[merv]

Here's the report from Silver Bullet http://www.silverbullet.co.nz/news.p...ef2ada83fbfc2b

[Slim]

Wot a weekend! We got sunburnt in New Plymouth!


The racing was good, but the bike show was cr@p. You could tell you were in Hicksville when the only 2 major bike brands to have stalls there (Yamaha & something else) had only 1 road model in amongst loads of ATVs & off-road bikes. The Ducati/KTM stand from Motomart was certainly the best of the lot.

Nice to see some women out there doing t-shirts & caps for the lady bikers amongst us. Only just started - I'll get back to you with their web address.

The Man was pretty amazed to spot Mt Egmont from New Plymouth on Saturday AND Sunday. Apparently, every other time he's visited, it's been hiding behind the clouds, to the point that he wondered if all those photo's he'd seen were actually pictures of Mt Fuji Photoshopped onto pictures of NZ scenery.

The ride down was pretty good, with The Man out the front as "bait" and with his radar detector. We only saw one cop the whole way down, just before 8 Mile Junction, hiding in a layby behind a large piece of roading machinery.

The ride home was absolutely awesome, with only 1 cop spied again (hopping into his car in Urenui) and some really nice back roads travelled: New Plymouth to 8-Mile Junction, SH4 for about 25km's then a wee road over the hills to Kopaki on SH30 which took us through to coffee at Whakamaru. We continued on SH30 to SH1 at Atiamuri, then north up SH1 to the next Rotorua turnoff (SH30 again) and SH33 from Rotorua to Te Puke. The only anxiety for the ride was watching out for the odd patch of melting tar. It's been a truly loooong time since I last blasted through lovely roads at 140-150kph regularly and The Man was well impressed that I was only about 3 minutes behind him when he stopped at one point on SH30.

[Skunk]

Nice to see some women out there doing t-shirts & caps for the lady bikers amongst us. Only just started - I'll get back to you with their web address.

TANK gear