Ground hog day. Thanks to us traveling from a GMT+12 zone to a GMT-10 over the international dateline we get a do-over day for Saturday. This time in a 25-degree tropical island rather than a sleety 10 degree Tauranga.
Everyone gets up far too early on the back of 5 hours sleep. Grumps everywhere.
First things first we start building all the bikes back up. To keep costs down (and fitness up) we’ve brought 4 mountain bikes from home to transport us around the place. Raro is small and flat. It’s perfectly suited for getting about this way. Tom is planted on a “shotgun” seat on my bike, so we are now ready to rock and roll. Thanks to an immediate failure of an inner tube our first day is decided. Off to Avarua to find a bike shop and test everything out.
As we mill about the older boys ghost off and find fun of their own kind. Some coconuts have grabbed their attention and thanks to the confidence of each owning a multitool with a sharp blade, an idea is hatched to crack these coconuts. Unsurprisingly, seconds later, both boys sustain deep cuts to their own hands within moments of each other. Day one and permanent scars. We clean them up and buy Dettol from the shop. Multitools are confiscated. The coconuts remain unscathed.
Thanks to our bodies still feeling the impact of the long (loooong) day previous, it’s a general effort to get up and rolling. It’s an 8km ride into Avarua from our house and we peel it off in about half an hour. Its already lunch time and we stop at “The New Place” on the main street of town. It’s nice and comfortable, has great outside seating. Some vegan options available which might be rare here. We have a lazy lunch in the heat. The fish is excellent. The boys devour it all (as is tradition).
I ask the waitress about a bike shop and it feels almost like a guess when she points us further down the road. 5 minutes. So off we ride.
Without sign of a bike shop we arrive at the main supermarket and decide to pause and get some groceries as the house is bare. I remember the supermarket as being the edge of town and it’s unlikely to have a bike shop past there. Pride ensures I don’t bother to look at the map and confirm this obvious, known fact.
Loaded up with groceries we decide to abandon the bike shop investigation and take our shopping back home. 10kms seems to be about Tom’s range for today and there’s not a lot to break the trip up back to our house. We fang it back.
On arrival at home I recheck the map. The bike shop is just past the supermarket exactly as the waitress informed me. I keep this knowledge to myself.
We are tired. It feels late. Going to bed early is its own reward. Of course, we fall asleep watching a static-y late version of One News on the single TV channel.