Category Archives: history

around home, city, history, NZ, vehicles

Art Deco Weekend 2017

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Having missed out on Napier’s renowned Art Deco Festival last year, being off riding the length of New Zealand for a couple of weeks, I was not going to let the same thing occur two years on the trot. So I bought a secondhand three-piece suit, pulled my fedora out from the wardrobe, snapped on some braces and rustled up a stripy bow-tie and prepared to check it all out.

Now in its twenty-ninth year, the festival celebrates Napier’s Art Deco heritage (much of the city was rebuilt in the style after a devastating earthquake, and fire, in 1931) with what seems to be a five-day long dress-up party – the twenties and thirties being the theme. Downtown is crowded with people in all sorts of elaborate outfits, there are vintage cars everywhere, and pages & pages worth of events & parties and more besides.

Thankfully for Hawke’s Bay’s countryside, the drought that was setting in broke heavily with over a hundred millimetres of rain in three days. This did however coincide with the height of the celebrations – most unfortunate. Countless events were moved inside and many cancelled – including the most renowned: all three vintage plane flight shows were done for as the planes couldn’t make it here. But the show did go on, and on it went in spectacular (if a little soggy) style.

Most of the public events centre around Marine Parade and the sound shell – opposite the wonderful Masonic, where many gathered.

Cars weren’t the only historic vehicles out and about.

Saturday afternoon’s vintage car parade was well attended by umbrellas. The Bentley club was in town from all over, impressive.

Beautiful cars, and many of them – those in open-topped ones looked decidedly damp.

There was plenty of opportunity to admire the vehicles afterwards.

This number plate caught my eye.

A few of the cars were originally from Napier.

Bikes even got a look in.

More Bentleys.

Apart from looking at cars, there were plenty of other interesting street scenes.

OK, there may have been more looking at cars.

I bumped into many people from work over the weekend – this time an American visitor, Jody, who I managed to get this photo (and the better ones in this post) from.

Sunday morning was finally dry and the Soap Box Derby went ahead. A pretty tame course down Tennyson St, the pushers had five metres to get their racers up to speed before letting gravity and momentum do the rest. Most of the soap boxes were elaborate and some made multiple appearances as different siblings from the same family raced in various age categories.

Yes, more cars – particularly struck by the body work on this one.

This was probably the oldest car around.

Sunday continued to warm, and was very humid. After a brief walk showing Jody some of the sights around Napier Hill and some lunch, it was time to get the town bike out for a little pootle. I’d foregone the organised bike ride Saturday morning on account of the persistent rain.

I did manage to get another photo of myself from an obliging passerby.

The Gatsby Picnic got moved off the soggy lawn it is always on, most picnicers went down the main street of town – this couple set up near Tom Parker Fountain and seemed to spend more time posing for photos than eating.

A most excellent weekend of fun and history – even if it was somewhat curtailed by the weather. I’m really looking forward participating more in next year’s celebrations.

family, history, NZ, roadtrip, travel

A little family road-trip to the start

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When I first hatched this plan to ride the inaugural Tour Aotearoa, Dad immediately volunteered to drive me to the start at the very top of the country. Not only that, he also offered to pick me up at the end – should I get there. This was a tremendous help as it took a lot of the planning out from the get-go.

It just so happened that I went and moved far away from my parents – all the way to Napier in the North Island. Nonplussed, Mum & Dad flew north and turned up at my house a few days before we set off on a good Pheasant roadtrip to far-flung parts of the country – wasn’t quite like childhood, as I had a bike next to me in the car not a sister.

We took it pretty easy heading north – as I was in Wave Two of the starters, I didn’t have to line up until Tuesday. So we spent three days making our way the seven-hundred-odd kilometres north visiting family and friends along the way. The highlight was definitely the visit to Matakohe – a place we’ve been many times before. Where the Pheasants settled way back when, there is a little bit of family stuff in the comprehensive and very well-done Kauri Museum. But this time I’d arranged a visit to a much smaller historic building.

Fortunately, David & Sherry were going to be in their small house the weekend we were traveling north. It just so happens that they had rescued their house forty years ago from its fate as a hay barn and faithfully restored it. This house was the house of my great-grandfather at the turn of the previous century and was where my grandfather and his siblings grew up, until the family moved south to Auckland for better educational opportunities. I was thrilled to be able to arrange the visit as Dad had never been inside the house, only looked in the windows.

It was a special visit discussing family history, how my great-aunt helped with the restoration details thanks to an extremely detailed memory, talking of the restoration in general, looking around the house in detail and roaming the grounds trying to imagine what it was like growing up on the edge of the Kaipara Harbour over a hundred years ago. Thanks to David & Sherry for having us – & doing such a thorough and incredible job of saving a bit, probably the biggest bit, of Pheasant family history around. Dad & I managed a walk down to where the wharf used to be – boats from here would have been the main connection with Auckland (boat to Helensville, then train to Auckland).

Leaving Matakohe, thoughts begin to turn more to just what I was about to embark on. This was probably brought on by driving north through, & stopping to buy riding food in, Dargaville – I could see some of the terrain I’d be riding through, up & over in but a few days’ time. At our accommodation in Kaitaia, the bike was pulled from the car and the final pack for 3000 km of adventure was completed with no drama. Ride time!

history, NZ, roadtrip, vehicles

A quicker trip through Canterbury

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It had been a while since a Pheasant road-trip around the South Island and even longer since I’d accompanied Dad to one of his work farm-visits. So Mum, Dad & I set off north to visit Adele in her new home near Westport – stopping overnight as Dad had some of his last farm visits. While Dad visited clients near Cust, Mum and I popped into Oxford – disappointing. But I’d had my eye on the map and was keen to go exploring the Ashley Gorge a bit.

I wanted to see this end of the Ashley River as on the Kiwi Brevet this year we ended up further up the Ashley River in a part of the country I previously had no idea about. But we turned away from the river at the bottom of Lees Valley on to a off-road route and so I never saw the road through the Ashley Gorge.

After driving half an hour up the road, I was glad that the Brevet route didn’t go through there. I was expecting a nice winding road carving through the hills at close to river-level. It definitely was not. As the road left the tarseal/tarmac/asphalt it climbed steeply, working the car’s engine hard and wound its way high above the river as we gazed over the precipitous drop below us. After half an hour of steady, but by no means quick, progress we were left look at this:

I realise just how isolated Lees Valley is now – and am quite glad we got into it on the Brevet through MacDonald Downs Station. Mindful of the time remaining to return to pick Dad up, and Mum’s desire to buy chestnuts from a roadside stall, there was no point in descending to the river to turn around right away. Having collected Dad, it was off again north to Culverden.

Near Culverden are Keith and Jenny, who are in the middle of trying to organise the finer points of moving on from their farm that they’ve had over the last twenty years – there’s an awful lot to do and many things to be moved or disposed of. They must be some of Dad’s oldest clients, of about forty years, so there’s a little history there and I was amused to stumble upon a photo of Dad standing around an open fire near the beach where we lived thirty-odd years ago.

Apart from my fleeting Brevet ride past, it must be about fifteen years since my last visit – so it was good to see Keith & Jenny and hear of their plans for retirement and of some of their travels. While Keith & Dad were out together looking over the farm one last time, I was intrigued by all the things that there were to get rid of after twenty years – naturally I went and poked around through various sheds. I found a few new things, but a lot things that remind me the eighties and nineties – & some that predated my memory.

A good flying visit, no doubt more of Keith & Jenny to be seen as they move much further south. Strangely for Culverden, it was pretty damp – so as we drove on there was a lot of cloud and mist to see, particularly over the Lewis Pass. With a few more stretches of the Brevet route much more easily driven than ridden, it was through the tortuous Buller Gorge to turn up at Adele’s home-for-a-year-or-so at Carters Beach.

bikepacking, bikes, Europe, GPS, history, travel

The hills may be getting bigger

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Well, my commandeered verandah may have kept me dry, but it was a rather broken night’s sleep. I still couldn’t manage to get away before nine – but when I did, I changed course south to cut across the bulge in Switzerland encroaching into France. I was off-road and with the overnight rain things were decidedly muddy. Quite by accident, as I approached the Swiss border I happened across Kilometre Zero – the start of the Western Front in WWI. At that time, before Germany had lost Alsace at Versailles, the German-French frontier was here with the Swiss to the south. The ruins of the German defences were still visible. The Swiss Army had recently reconstructed the wooden fort that they used to keep an eye on the belligerents.

I turned to the road for a while before laying my eyes on a ridge above the valley to the south. This whole time it had been overcast with just enough drizzle to mean that the jacket had to stay on – but with the warmth, the rain trousers didn’t last long. I followed a double-track gravel road to the top of the ridge – it was pretty steep and took me through seven and then eight hundred metres. There was a tiny ski field at the top, but a missing sign sent me on a big loop downhill and then I had to recover quite a bit of altitude – a little frustrating to lose an hour, but hey ho.

There was a big plunge down to the River Doubs, it was rocky, slippery and all kinds of good fun to ride down. It’s times like these that make it nice to have a mountain-bike with big knobbly tyres on such a tour – I do spend quite a bit of time off-road now that it’s drier than the Ardennes. Trying to get a few miles in for the day, I followed the river down the valley to St Hippolyte – a rather nice little town that had a potable water supply outside the information centre (many fountains seen so far today were non-potable) and provided the day’s bakery stop.

Every village has a church and it’s usually the most obvious thing to take a photo of – this one before the first big climb of the day.

The valley from which I climbed.

And into the Doubs valley.

St Hippolyte

The only way out of St Hippolyte, in the southerly direction I was headed, is a really big road climb – my biggest yet that took me up 400 metres on a rather busy road. After giving him a head start in town, I hauled in another cycle tourist – he for some reason had two rear panniers, a bag on the handlebars and a trailer usually used for towing children with who-knows-what in it. That some people manage to find so many things to take on tour continues to baffle me – he really was breathing heavily.

I read somewhere, it doesn’t seem believable, that this area was where the first pack horses were bred. This one certainly had a great deal of stockiness about it.

At the top of the hill it did seem that I was up on a plateau – maybe this is what Adrien was talking about. Through a mixture of roads, forestry roads and mountain-bike trails I continued south. Stopping in Le Russey for dinner I got chatting to a couple of mountain-bikers that were just heading out on their weekly club ride. I was tempted to join them, if I could find somewhere to store my rear bag, but truth be told I was too tired from the day’s climbing. For only the second time this trip I had hauled myself and my load (small compared to some, admittedly) through over two thousand metres of climbing. I didn’t last long after dinner before finding a camping spot – I hope my tent stays up as there’s been a strong southerly all afternoon (which was delightful), it’s just started to rain and the stony ground here was not at all receptive to tent pegs.

Oh, if anyone can tell me what these little towers are for I’d be most interested. I first noticed them back in the Ardennes, they were larger there. I thought first perhaps they were fire lookouts (always in forested areas), but they are much too short. The one on the left is tiny, the platform is barely a metre off the ground; the one on the right is more of a normal size for around here.