Clutha Gold Trail

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Earlier this year Julie and her Dad, "Bigsy", biked the Alps to Ocean bike trail from Tekapo to Oamaru, a distance of 310 kilometres. Bigsy had just turned 80 so it was a pretty impressive achievement. Afterwards I'd promised Julie that we would bike the West Coast Wilderness trail next March or April but s I'm now going to Kiribati that wasn't now going to happen. So we decided to do the Clutha Gold Trail in Central Otago instead.

So last week we set off on our bike ride, spending a couple of nights at our bach and then heading south to Lawrence in Central Otago. We left my car at Lawrence and took  shuttle to Clyde at the far end of the trail. The driver was really accommodating showing us various sites along the way and going ou of his way to show us the motels we'd be staying at. He was a former cricketer and had lived in Temuka in the mid 80s before moving to Alexandra so we had a good chat about cricket, the various clubs in South Canterbury, and the state of the game locally.


Day 1: Weds December 13th 
We left from Clyde about 8:30. We had a couple of options, travel along the last leg of the Otago Rail trail to Alex, following the main road, or crossing the Clyde river and biking along the shore. We chose the latter and so biked along the river to lexandra some 12 kms downstream. In Alex we stopped for a couple of hours so Julie could catch upw ith a midwifery colelagee who had moved to Alex this year, then about 11am we continued on the enxt leg of our journey, form Alex to Doctor's Point. this seciton was pretty eady goding, mainly gentale underlations as we rode into the rocky Roxburgh gorge. The weather was overcast and cool, ideally biking condrions. It would have been pretty damn hot on a sunny day with the sun being blsted off the shist rock of the gorge.






















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