Today I hit a coffee shop near camp in Twizel to continue the impossible task of uploading photos I take here to Flickr. Made it through most of them before needing to hit the road, though.

I had a lot of long and gradual climbs as I worked upwards towards towards the base of Mount Cook. My only real complaint of touring the South Island (other than the wind, hills, magpies and soon I will add sand flies to this list) is that it is very sparsely populated. I really enjoy getting to take a long lunch with a beer. Sadly a lot of days I go from start to finish before seeing a place to eat. Usually there is a dairy along the way so I can get a cold coke and maybe a meat pie. Today the one restaurant mentioned by Pedallers Paradise, 55km in, was permanently closed. So from my coffee in Twizel until dinnerish at my destination (75km) I was on my own eating next to the road.

Shortly after sadly leaving where I was hoping to eat lunch, someone yelled “Hey I work for reddit!” out of a car window after spotting my jersey. So I pulled over and met Lia and her husband and talked for a while. I hadn't at this point figured out how to get my camera to deal with dimly lit people in front of bright backgrounds so hopefully I can get her to email me a better copy of this photo from her camera.