Exploring a road once far more often travelled

horseback riders here in Golden Bay.

We see that TDC has held another one of those ‘‘let’s be seen to care about cycle safety events’’ here at our newly developed recreation centre that has not one single bike rack for cyclists and no cycleway on the fast main road that leads to this development. My view The entire top of the south was warm, sunny and still, a perfect day for an expedition to check progress on State Highway 1, visit some familiar haunts and enjoy a picnic lunch on an east coast beach.

Husband Steve and I have both frequently travelled the highway between Blenheim and Christchurch, especially in our younger years. We know it well.

Steve travelled to boarding school from Nelson to Christchurch by bus and then train. His family drove that route to visit relations in Dunedin and Waiau for Christmas and Easter holidays almost every year.

Train journeys back to school were a chance to meet up with college friends and lark about. Throwing coarse, white railway china lifted from the Kaikoura station tearooms off the Claverley bridge was a favourite jape of travelling schoolboys. Avoiding were a few construction company double-cab utility vehicles and trucks carrying concrete pipes, concrete bridge beams and other construction cargo. Bored stop-go attendants halted us at road works more than a dozen times. We drove slowly through detours, one-way routes or around subsidence when eventually released from our queue of one. But for most of the journey north of the coast, there was just us, the shaved green hills gridded with grape vines and the eerily empty road.

We stopped at Ward for a cup of tea. The waitress, made casual by the severe customer drought, forgot to bring the cups. Cabinet food was sparse on the smeared glass shelves. A few pies and sausage rolls dried and flaked in the heated unit.

As we descended to the Ure, the familiar triangle of blue sea appeared between the hills. Detouring around major bridge works, we drove south past the closed and shuttered Kekerengu cafe´ and the St Oswald’s Anglican Church near Wharanui where a large sign board appealed to nonexistent passers-by for restoration funds. The Kaikoura mountains,