TA Day 20 - Lake Rotoroa to Springs Junction

 67.3 miles, 3940’ climbing

Lodging: Springs Junction Holiday Homes

At 7am, the lady who runs our lodging brought us an amazing breakfast: poached eggs from her hens on whole grain toast with avocado, roast tomato, and bacon. She also continued to tell us entertaining stories. What people leave: charging cables, clothes, false teeth. About eels: the ones in the lake are huge and protected, the ones in the river are smaller and taste muddy. About her hens: possums leave them alone, wood hens pinch their eggs but they are protected; we admitted we had no idea what wood hens are. She said they look like kiwi birds (cute, rare) but they are bigger and you sometimes see them running off with a full egg in their beaks. On swimming in the lake: she swims on most warm days and the eels don’t bother her. But a few years ago, some boys went out on the lake at night, intoxicated, and one fell in and drowned. His body was never found. Eels are meat eaters, and they say eels ate him. Hmmm.

We headed straight out onto a gravel climb, a shock to the system first thing in the morning. Soon we topped the pass and had a cold descent on gravel through a beautiful valley with farms. It felt great to turn west on pavement with the sun on our backs and a descent to the town of Murchison. 

In Murchison we saw Sam, Keza, and also Rob and ?? at the wonderful River Bend coffee house. We last saw Rob and ?? at our jet boat ride on the north island. Sam and Keza left ahead of us.

From Murchison we had a long rolling climb to a pass where we took our checkpoint photos. At the pass, a small bird seemed interested in interacting with Ed, but it spat out the shortbread cookie crumbs we offered. Very cute, definitely not a beggar bird. The descent had a lot of gravel which makes your back tire skid sometimes, but soon we were down and on the final miles to Springs Junction. We had reserved a holiday home that we were told was 380m from an junction, but with no indication in which direction. Fortunately we spotted our cottage before the junction, a comfy little place we were glad to arrive at.

We have the Big River trail tomorrow. Rain is coming in a few days, so it will be good to get thru that trail before that.