Featherston to Wellington

We got up nice and early and scavenged what we had left of food to form a make shift breakfast. Once the tummies were full we were ready to head off. The way we had planned the trip was to have the last day consist of only the Rimutaka and a remaining 40 km into Wellington city seeing as the mountain was 690 metres high, which made it the biggest hill so far!

Now for the last few days we were so frustrated at ridding long boring straights that we couldn't even listen to our music without getting annoyed. However with a huge mountain ahead of us we switched the music back on and began to climb. It was an epic pace that we maintained and cars cheered us on as we made our way to the summit which help motivate us further. This hill was a perfect example of a rugged NZ mountain pass, being cut straight from the mountain over looking a huge gorge. We were lucky that it happened to be a Saturday as not a single truck passed by, it could have been a little hairy if they were around as there was barely enough room for two campervans to pass side by side.

We were both amazed at how easy we made it to the top, not a single break was taken and yet we managed to stay in 2nd or 3rd gear the whole way up!

Once at the top we took a moment to absorb the fact that this was the highest we had been so far on this journey and moments later we decided that we should add a tree into the equation as were still not high enough.

Before heading down the hill we noticed an incomplete drawing of a flower so we completed it before heading onwards.

About 10 km after the hill we started to feel really drained, our muscle had actually ran out of energy! So we pulled over and searched our bags for food. There was one can of super gnarly, some old bread and a can of baked beans. It was a struggle to get down as it tasted pretty bad but we got through it! Haha we also noticed after we were full that the bread was fully covered in soggy mould, somehow we were to hungry to have noticed!

With the tummies full we continued into Wellington. It was good to see that Wellington had a well set up bike lane along the high way between upper and lower hut. It was a shame however that everyone using it was a spandex warrior ridding a $4000 dollar bike at the speed of a toddler with training wheels. We even overheard one of them complaining about having a sore butt because he had just ridden from work in upperhut!!! Come on mate that's like 20 km try going 100 km a day on a $200 bike.

So anyway we ended up getting pretty lost, as our mate Ryan lived in Hataitai and we had no idea there was a tunnel going through the mountain. We had a few attempts at trying to find a way over the hill before we ask this guy Liam who was ridding a BMX where to go.

We made it to Ryans and found out our mate Dean was heading down to Welly as well! It was good to catch up with a few of the Barrier boys again.