As part of my preparation for travelling to work each day, I hired a mountain bike to test out the voyage from Paraparaumu (where my new office is) to Otaki and back again. This was stage one in committing to an ebike to travel into work – I needed to check that the coast was clear and that there were no major obstacles on the route. I also wanted to get a sense of what it would be like to go there and back if my bike battery ran out, so I would know how it would be under the worst circumstances. And this is what I learnt…
… actually, it was ridiculously smooth riding. There was one incident where as I travelled along the newly minted and well maintained bike track alongside the Expressway, a cow mooed very loudly, almost throwing me off my seat in fright, but apart from that my trip out was incident free.
The return trip was a little more complicated, mainly because I didn’t follow the turnoff to the Expressway bike track and instead returned by the old State Highway 1 route. There were a couple of hairy moments, such as when I had to go across the bridge over the Otaki river where there is no bike track for about 20 metres, and again along the bridge into Waikanae, but I still found the drivers to be respectful and to give me a wide berth.
It was also the day after Hurricane Gita so the trek back was met with heavy headwinds and intermittent rain. By that point I was pretty exhausted, having been on a bike for the better part of three hours. So I found my energy dropping at the end of the journey, which slowed me down, and the rain forced me to get on and off my bike to add and remove my jacket, but aside from that it was all good.
The track is well maintained, and even once you get to the end of the Expressway bike track, there is still ample room with an established bike track along the State Highway. The return trip into Paraparaumu from Otaki can be confusing if you take the State Highway route the whole way. At one point I just ended up in a park with bifurcating paths everywhere, but it was still a beautiful ride. One of the main things about biking was it gave me time to look around at the scenery, and by jolly, it’s a gorgeous picture at points along the Kapiti coast.
The return trip took me 1 hour 40 minutes inclusive of stops. I strongly suspect that without the headwinds, the exhaustion, the rain, and with a greater familiarity with the terrain, I could have made it in 1 hour 10. Add to that the speed and acceleration of an ebike, which would have taken my average speed up from around 18 kph to around 28-29 kph, and I’m pretty sure I can make the journey in 50-55 minutes on a decent day, about the length of one long prep.
My brain has mapped out the mental terrain and I’m now feeling pretty confident. More importantly, testing the route out before committing to a purchase made me realise a way that I could save even more money. I had thought that the bike track would be bumpy, having noticed the gravelly track from a car window. My plan to get around this was to buy a bike with additional suspension to give me an easier ride. But the bikes I was looking at in this range with this quality of suspension all costed upwards of $3,500. Riding the route in advance on a mountain bike that had literally no suspension made me realise that the track was actually fine and a high suspension model was totally unnecessary. That meant I was confident to be able to drop down to a more basic $1,500 ebike model. By renting a simple mountain bike and testing the route as well as shopping around a bit, I managed to save myself upwards of $2,000 in a single day. I’ll just pay for it in my sperm count later on.
Pretty good outcome for an afternoon’s cycling. I enjoyed the mountain bike experience, but overall I can’t wait for the ebike…
