DeeKnow’s Grotto

Last year I rode my Bike (the powered one) over to Hahei for our beach holiday while Kym drove the car. I'd just bought the Kwaka and was desperate to put hundreds of glorious Coromandel road kilometres into the thing so it was a pretty easy sell. This year however I was deviously made to feel guilty enough about her being on her own in the car and on the beach while I'm out riding, and I ended up leaving the Bike at home and sharing a berth in the tin-pot over to the coast

Come Sunday I leapt into her Mazda and powered my way back over the hills to Paeroa for the battle of the streets bike race. I left the front windows down and tried to lean into the steering wheel a little to emulate the feeling of being on a bike but it just wasnt quite happening. It was bloody torture ambling along behind slower cars with a stream of overtaking bikes passing freely by all the way.

Made it to Paeroa in reasonable time, parked the car, slapped on some sun screen and waddled through to find the lads amongst the throng of smelly leather clad spectators. Spotted Agent748 first then along came Ricardo, Seth and the Thin Man. We caught a good chunk of the first round of races and all of the last one. A bloody good day as usual. Photos here if your interested.

Racing hilights were many. Definately cool to see legendary kiwi former GP racer Ginger Malloy in action during the classics. Wicked to see how well Jared Love did on the new Honda, awesome to see the other well known lads like Stroud, Rees, Anstey and Bernards etc battling it out. Great to see how competitive Sherrifs was too on the 600 against the bigger machines. And really cool to see Steve Bridge do well on his personally built Ducati TT2 machine.

The only downer was losing my credit card at some point and the instant spine chilling fear of what Pedersons reaction was gonna be when I got back to eftpos-barren Hahei after the racing. Fortunately the story had a happy, if somewhat embarrassing end, as Ricardo cruely points out in his blog ...

Two highlights really, the first was hearing the Blogfather's name mentioned over the PA 'cos he'd lost his credit card and some honest soul had handed it in, complete with the $20 note that was with it, ironically it was the only public service announcement of the day, for years now he'll be at bike meets and everyone will go "hey, you're the guy who lost his credit card at Paeroa 2005!".

12:00:00 PM