Oropi Grove ride

I had a work trip to Tauranga booked in today, conveniently one of the Vorb Tauranga locals had a bit of free time in the afternoon so we planned to hook up for an afternoon ride at Oropi Grove.

Had a painfully slow drive to Tauranga in the morning, I left home at 6.45 AM thinking I would miss the worst of the traffic, damn road works proved me wrong, it took me an hour to get to the BP fuel stop on the motorway, get a coffee and back on the road. 3 hours to Tauranga – slow !

However, work went pretty well, I had the audit complete by 12.00, the network upgrade went pretty good at mid-day and most things were wrapped up by 1.00. I went to catch up with a friend for a coffee at 2.00 and then managed to clear the office by 3.30 to go to Oropi for a ride. I have been pretty lucky with getting rides in when I go to Tauranga on work trips, and you would think I could find the damn place…. No ! I had instructions from a guy in the office plus instructions from the guy I was meeting; they sort of conflicted so I ended up getting quite lost. To compound this my horn started to go off kind of randomly, which was a bit embarrassing as it hooted at the car in front of me at a red light. Luckily I found an auto electrician who spent an entire 10 seconds disabling it for me. Once that was sorted I got new directions and soon found my way to the bike park and met my riding buddy.

The weather was good but there had been a bit of rain over the weekend, so the tracks were a bit greasy in places, most of the track was pretty good, but I did slide off once when I my front wheel did not go round a corner at the same pace as the rest of the bike. We rode at fairly decent pace, not too fast but definitely not slow, we also hardly stopped so it was quite a good pre-race build up ride. There is not a lot of trail at Oropi, In the 50 minutes we were riding we covered most of the trails and one section twice, nice mix of short climbs and twisty downhills. It is a fun place to ride with heaps of little (and not so little jumps and drops to play on).

It was a good ride, I felt good getting back into the car for the long drive home.

No injuries and no mechanicals, though I do need to buy some more brake pads before I go away at the weekend.