“There’s a lot of Between in New Zealand and it’s where adventure lives.”
On the 19th of October 2021 I went for a bike ride. This wasn’t surprising or unusual, I’d gone for a ride the previous 1387 days. However, I’d never ridden more than 800km before and, in all honesty, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
The prompt came from a small dog called Rustle. Rustle was born in April 2021 near Edievale, West Otago. in a fit of optimism on day, we decided that not only would he join our family, but we’d drive the 1800km round trip from Nelson to Edievale to pick him up.
Y’know when you’re driving along, and you look out at a mountain range wondering what would it’d be like to climb over? Between Omarama and Otrehau, maps show a bunch of mountains, rivers and blank bits— that’s the “Between”. There’s a lot of Between in New Zealand and it’s where adventure lives. As we hustled along on our trip to collect Rustle, an idea started to congeal about connecting bits of the Between into some sort of multi day bike adventure.
The purchase of the bike I’d be using for this adventure, a 2021 Trek Rail 7, can be traced to a particularly stupid ride I did in 2009 at Lake Tekapo. At the time I was a fairly fit 30-something who thought riding around Lake Tekapo in the snow on a fully rigid commuter bike with 38mm tyres would be a laugh.
It turns out it wasn’t that funny because whatever I did to my body on that ride triggered an autoimmune condition I’m still dealing with. The condition is ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory arthritis where my body attacks my joints and organs. By the end of the year, I was hobbling around on
