Otago Rail Trail Day 3

LENticular clouds

Gilchrist's Store Oturehua

What a fantastic day! At 7.00am this morning (Saturday) the wind was howling and there were splats of rain on our roof vent so we thought we were going to be in for a rough day on the rail trail. However by 9.00 there was a lot of blue sky showing behind the white clouds and the black ones had virtually disappeared. We have noticed very unusual cloud formations in this area. Isolated clouds that look like spaceships or stacks of pancakes and are called lentricular clouds form here when the winds are very strong and we have seen a lot of them above us while doing the trail.

The top!

There were plenty about this morning as we rode uphill to the highest point on the track but fortunately the strong unrelenting wind was pretty much in our favour, coming from the northwest.
Early on the track we diverted to see the remains of the Golden Progress Mine, an historic site which contains Otago's only remaining "poppet head" used for bringing gold-bearing ore to the surface.
Once we were at the highest point on the track we absolutely motored as it was mostly all downhill from there on and we had the wind at our backs. We got up to about 32kph in places but had to be careful on the rough, gravelly track. We didn't see any other bikers for the 1st 1.5 hours but when we did we had to try not to be too smug as we freewheeled past as they were struggling against the wind uphill. At one point I turned my bike around to see what it felt like for them and I could only do about 7kph on a gentle slope! So there were a few walkers pushing their bikes out there today and we are definitely heading in the right direction!
We passed through Wedderburn where there is only a tavern in the distance apart from the old station buildings and stopped for lunch in Ranfurly before heading on to Daisybank where the bus was to pick us up at 3.15pm to return us to Debussy at Oturehua. There is nothing at Daisybank except a carpark and we were running early so we stopped at Waipiata where there is a Pub but nothing else and had a beer each in the sun and wind. We were the only ones there but the Publican said that he had had 69 locals and 9 cyclists in last night. Some of the "locals" travel for 40 km to get there!

Rehydrating!

We were still an hour early for the bus and so we had a bit of a wait. I'm surprised that we are not seeing more people on the track as it is so popular - while we waited one person on his own passed us and then a French couple with 2 young children who were parked next to us last night stopped and chatted. No one else came by at all.
The bus was on time and we had already hidden our bikes in the long grass for picking up once we had collected our own bus. The Publican at Oturehua had sugested that we park about 3 km along the road near the river, where others often camp, rather than stay in the carpark so we have done that although we are the only ones here.
Tomorrow we have our last day of biking, from Daisybank to Middlemarch so lets hope that wind is still kind to us! With our sidetrips today we did about 50 km and it was great - I think we only have 38 km to go!