Skip to main content

Kingston: Day 8

Photo (c) Wynston Cooper 2014

Today's schedule required us to travel almost 40km so it was decided to bike it rather than walk. Riding at a leisurely pace and stopping somewhere for lunch should see us there by 2.00, at least that was the theory. At Fairlight Phil's pedal fell off. So, rather than have him finish the day as a passenger in the support vehicle we decided to walk the last 12 km.

Much of the riding section of the day was spent on the cycleway, which is not entirely finished but with one or two diversions because of non existent bridges - and for one small piece, non existent cycleway - it was perfectly manageable. At Athol we stopped to visit St. Bartholomew's church. This pretty little building looks and feels loved. It is clean and uncluttered and is one of the few churches around which is permanently open and yet remains unmolested by vandals or thieves. It is a holy and whole place. Sadly, it is one of our places of worship whose future is doubtful because there are not a lot of people who use it anymore. Perhaps its role as a wayside chapel is enough justification to keep it. Perhaps. The use of such buildings is a huge issue we face as a diocese and there is no obvious solution to it in this case or in perhaps a dozen others.

Just down the road at the Lazybones cafe we met Carol who runs the cafe and cleans the church. The cafe is on the market, because for Carol and her husband 8 years of keeping it open for 7 days a week is just about enough. The Lazybones is filled with homecrafts for sale and a huge collection of old toys. It's a pleasant place to visit and the coffee is good. Sooner or later it will sell, and the congregation of St. Bartholomews will drop again.

At Garston we made sandwiches in the park and took photos under the sign proclaiming it to be the most landlocked town in New Zealand. Then it was on to Fairlight.

We walked to Kingston on the cycleway, but after a few km switched to the main road because it looked like it might be shorter. The road ran straight for most of the way but the sheer grandeur of the scenery stopped any sense of boredom. It was a fine, clear day, and the lake, when we trudged up to it around 4:00 pm was a translucent turquoise. Kingston on a day like today is very beautiful indeed though people tell me the winds can be pretty ferocious. Still, I couldn't help looking at some of the places with "for sale" signs up and wondering if we could run to it. Walking the last mile to the jetty we met a pleasant woman who turned out to be the editor of the local news sheet. She took a photo and some notes for a story and was mighty interested to learn that the Archbishop of York was going to be in town tomorrow.

So now we are safely billeted for the night. We have , again, been generously catered for, and met some very interesting people. The weather map looks settled for our trip up the lake and I'm looking forward to seeing the Crown Range from the air.

Comments

Merv said…
Love the photo.
Green is a fascinating colour & the Waikato will look like that again one day.

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

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

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

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

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