Dukes recent aquisition, a Triumph 1050 Speed Triple, looked and sounded awesome, and over the next 6 hours we wound our way throught some spectacular scenery, including a sun soaked ride through National Park to the sleepy little town of Wanganui, which gets turned into an insane street race once a year.
Sorry about the lack of race photo's - I just can't seem to get good action shots on an iphone.
To be honest, the racing wasn't worth the effort getting there this time, over the 3 or 4 hours we were there we only saw 3 or 4 races due to too many crashes, clean ups restarts etc.
The most interesting crash happened before we arrived, one of the methanol burning side cars hit the hay bales, and spilt fuel set them on fire.
Think about this a minute, it's a sunny day, methanol burns with no visible flame, how do you know whats on fire - well, they could only tell the hay bales were on fire when they suddenly turned black and fell apart, and then the flames appeared!!!
Enter the fire service, tear all the bales apart in the area, soak them all, clean up and start racing again an hour later, just another normal days racing at Wanganui.
To tell the truth, watching the racing wasn't the reasoning for getting away, it's the end of what's been a hard year and a de-stress valve was needed, and the ride certainly accomplished that.
We left before the racing finished and headed over to Palmerston North for the night.
The next day we headed up some glorious back roads to Taihape, then took a detour over the Gentle Annie (at least we think that was the roads name, doesn't really matter as it turned out to be one of the best roads either of us have ridden in a long time, great variety of corners, almost no traffic, and stunning scenery) and on to Napier, the art deco capital of the world, for lunch.
After that it was through to Taupo, and then push on back to Auckland.
It's always interesting doing a long trip (1260 km's in 2 days), as my riding posture is great when I start, and as the day goes on I turn into the motorcycling equivient of Jabba the Hutt as the miles roll on and I slowely sink down into a small round pile of flesh...ah well, we can't all be Rossi eh.
It was a brilliant couple of days break, good riding, good company, raesonable food and no tickets (that I know of).
Now, to clean the bike - that could take a while as all reasonable sized bugs had been informed that I was out and the set their radars accordingly
