Skip to main content

Dunedin: Days 16 & 17

I had an odd feeling when we left our lodgings in Naseby that I should be taking Te Harinui with us on the bikes. I talked it over with John and we agreed that the symbolic presence of the Gospel represented by this piece of wood was powerful and needed not to be consigned to the back of a van. But there was the danger of it getting stuck in a wheel, so we left it, clearly labeled, at Wedderburn  with the luggage.

The weather was great for biking. It was slightly overcast but not cold as we climbed slowly out of the Maniototo and towards Hyde. There was a tunnel and a couple of semi adventurous bridges. There was the usual passing parade of jaw dropping scenery. We wheeled into Hyde around 1:15 pm, having covered about 50 km before lunch. This was a pretty impressive feat for two newcomers to the team, Amelia and Megan, who were fairly new to this sort of cycling. We had lunch at Hyde before being picked up by our hosts and taken to Tussock Lodge. We got to this very pleasant country sleepery to find all the luggage piled up and waiting for us except Te Harinui.

I phoned Trail Journeys who were the luggage carriers. They asked the driver and he remembered seeing it but hadn't picked it up. Perhaps the proprietor of the Wedderburn Cottages would know more. They'd phone her and get back to me. Well actually, they didn't. I began to get a bit worried and after an hour or so of calling back with no reply, walking 50-100 metres down the drive every time to get coverage, I thought I'd call Wedderburn myself and looked up their website to get the number.

The webpage was pretty good. It had webcams! With shots updated every half hour. And in one of the shots there was our luggage, with Te Harinui leaning on the top. And in the latest shot, taken only 5 minutes ago in the same spot, our luggage was gone (naturally) but Te Harinui was still leaning against the wall. At least I knew where it was. Nicki, our amazing proprietor at Tussock Lodge gave me her car to go and collect it but only after enjoining me not to go putting any petrol into it.  So a 50 km roundtrip later it was safe and sound back where it belonged. I can't quite remember, but I may not have quite acquiesced to all of Nicki's injunctions.  I could relax and enjoy the great barbecue the lodge had prepared for us.

The next day, today, I devised a way of fixing the stick to my pack. It was actually no bother, and downhill all the way and with a bit of a tailwind I made it to Middlemarch a few minutes ahead of everyone else.

People keep asking me, "what's the highlight of the trip so far?" and I can't answer because every day there is a highlight. There was another one today. The Taieri Gorge Railway locomotive arrived in Middlemarch right on time at 12:00 noon and to my astonishment there were over 180 of our people on board. A sizable bunch had travelled up from Southland and there were people from all over the diocese. At 1:00 we pulled out and headed for Dunedin and I preached four times. We celebrated Eucharist in 4 carriages, with the services staggered 15 minutes apart. I arrived, spoke,  (interrupted at some interesting moments by the commentary on the train's PA system) and moved on to the next carriage. At the last one I was the celebrant. I moved among the people delivering the body and blood of  Our Lord as the train swayed and lurched and some of the most spectacular scenery that Otago has to offer rolled past the windows. It was moving in every conceivable way.

We arrived in Dunedin at 3:40 pm. We took a group photo which included most but not all of us rail pilgrims. Clemency drove me home and suddenly I felt tired. Very tired indeed.

Labels:

Comments

Alden Smith said…
I have been following with great interest your journey. All the very best to you and your fellow pilgrims. I hope the weather remains good for the rest of your time on the road. I particularly like this photo with the little dog in the foreground. Every blessing.
31 March 2014 at 08:55
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more