Once we got moving for the day, we jumped onto the wilderness trail. It took up through some beautiful bush. As you can see I took heaps of photos!

The trail was very fun, I really enjoyed it. The best thing about it was we cycled right near Lake Mahinapua and we never got see it. We got to see the awesome blue mushrooms! An old sawmills area. We went on a skinny boardwalk that wouldn’t be fun if you fell off into the water. Howeve, once out of the bus, we had a road section. Then a really boring straight 10km road with a slight incline because it was an old railway. We finally got to this cool bridge from 1909. We went down and under to take a good look. There were these signs saying only ….km to go with a picture of all these happy cyclists in a picture frame. Well I don’t get to do that, do I. I get to carry on and skip Ross.

We have a few kilometres on highway 6 before we turn off onto a dirt road. It looks like we will get to the beach but it doesn’t reach. We rejoin the road again and cross a small bridge and then an up to highway 6 again. At the top we can see a long one way bridge that we go down to and a straight up on the otherside. We catch our breath and wait for traffic. We don’t get far up the hill and we push our bikes. We have done about 40km now so the ups are much harder as they day wears on. It is a slog all the way until the last 3km to our campsite.

We did it 59km for the day! Lake Ianthe is lovely, we have been here before and DOC has just put in new bathrooms. We had our usual swim while the foreigners looked at us like we are crazy.