Modern Vespa

it's still winter here in New Zealand, but the forecast for today (Sunday) has been great all week so I put a ride up on our Facebook page and invited the locals along. Must be too cold for the young ones, just 2 over 70s, (Mr and Mrs pigletpilot on Gabriella and one other on a Cosa), but the weather was too good to not go.
We started at Hamilton Gardens, World Gardens of the Year 10 years ago, and took a short run on the Waikato Expressway before turning towards the airport and Mystery Creek. This is the site of the biggest agricultural Field days in New Zealand every June, but it's very empty right now. We continued south through the very edge of Cambridge and arrived at Karapiro Dam, a concrete arch dam that's a little over 50m tall and 335m long. There's a road over the top joining the village to the west side of Lake Karapiro and the Karapiro Domain. This lake is home to New Zealand's national rowing and canoeing training centres. It's a base load power station that opened in May 1948 and generates up to 90MW of power. A brief stop here for photos, and checking what had been a busy phone before we headed for Matamata via a beautiful twisty road that eventually took us past the Hobbiton Movie Set Farm. None of the set can be seen from the road! We carried on to Matamata, a rural service town that's also made a name for itself as a centre for Hobbiton tours.
After a very pleasant lunch we gassed up and headed home via Scotsman Valley, another great windy road that was such a lot of fun to ride.
A great couple of hours of riding with good company and a beautiful lunch.

Thank you for the report and pics! Always love it when winter weather allows for a ride.

I always get a kick out of th fact that you folks below the equitator are in Winter now. Although, I don't think you get the freezing temperatures and heavy snow. Call me Northern Centric, but when does Santa Claus show up?

Just kidding - thanks for the great photos.

Bob Copeland

Bob We don't get snow in Hamilton, very VERY occasionally see it on a tall hill we can see from home, but -1C overnight is cool enough. We get good frosts here.