I woke up to rain this morning. Pretty common occurrence, so I pulled out my kindle and figured I'd wait it out. A couple hours pass and it's still raining so I packed my bags, waited for a lull in the rain and frantically packed the tent, loaded the bike and headed out. Needed new groceries too and by the time I left Miller's Flat it was after noon. I'm in no rush, I remind myself.

Today the goal was Alexandria, a town I passed through while doing the rail trail a while back. Coming here last time I road mostly downhill on the long and rough gravel rail trail but today's ride in was all paved and all covered in hills. I broke my speed record on the touring bike 3 separate times, actually, with the last one being 44mph. I'm still pretty impressed the Surly carries so much gear, feels at home on dirt roads and completely comfortable at 40mph+.

In case I didn't really talk about why I'm revisiting areas it iss because I made the weird decision to head to the east coast after getting to Omarama, rather than heading south over Lindis Pass. From there I road down the coast to Dunedin where I wanted to ride the rail trail I had heard a lot about. When this ended I road up towards Queenstown and down, around the southern coast and now get to cut a north west diagonal across to continue on.

After tomorrow it should all be new territory again.