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Our first trial trip was an agonising 55kms – and this was without loaded panniers! How we are going to cope with 6000kms we are not sure.

We did a round trip from Bournemouth to Corfe castle and back to Bournemouth via the Sandbanks ferry and along Bournemouth beach.

We tried out our gopro headcam and got a lot of strange looks from the Bournemouth folk. Might be best to subtlely strap it to the handlebars or something.

We took photos every 5 seconds then uploaded some of the pics to youtube using their free stupeflix app.

gopro headcam photos

Part One – The Electrical Items.

1. Ensure your name is neither Mike or Jo.

If your name is Mike or Jo then do the following:

2. Lay out all your gear in an organised manner.

3. Discard all cameras which require interchangable lenses (leaving our dslrs in NZ was a good call)

4. Out of the remaining 10 cameras pick your favourite two. (That’s two each right?)

5. Replace two laptops with a netbook

6. Replace books with e-readers (and complementary e-reader holder from airnz)

7. Replace maps with a garmin edge

Stay Tuned for Part Two – The Camping Gear

It’s airport day. Our car broke down. Why does this always happen on airport day?

Halfway over the hill we overtook a clapped out campervan when our car stopped. I’m blaming Mike for not getting it serviced and for his views on speed limiting cars to 100km/hr. Dora obviously took offence (not that she can do more that 100 km/hr anyway but probably just a car alliance thing)

We managed to get Dora going again and crawled the rest of the trip behind the smelly old camper. We have Lord of the Rings to thank for this.

We decided to catch the bus from Thames ‘cos nobody likes to do the airport run. Dad dropped us off after putting our car into storage. (Thanks Dad!)

The bus was chocker full of BO ridden people and there were no seats left for us. With a bit of a defrag we managed to free up some space so we could sit together.

Mike read his book:

We had to wait for a change of bus at Manukau. Manukau is a multicultural experience. It’s like all the foreigners fly into Auckland and don’t get any further than Manukau before deciding to settle there.

Overall the public bus experience wasn’t too bad and we got to sightsee all the nice suburbs of South Auckland. The only downside is getting to the airport 8 hours early. Oh well – guess we will just have to sit in the Koru club and drink free beer.