Extracted from a letter to May entitled “Sean’s overview of 1993”

At the end of February 1993, the group – Donna, Milton, Alan, Will, Brian, Helen and me – spent 10 days cycling around the Coromandel Peninsula in the North Island not far out from Auckland. We took our own bikes. We cycled from Auckland airport and after completing a circuit of the peninsula starting and ending at the township of Thames, we caught a bus back to Auckland.

The country is beautiful and the terrain is quite varied making great riding and we camped at some rather interesting places. Our first night out was spent where there was an Olympic sized pool filled with water from a hot spring (Miranda Hot Springs). It was just the thing for our sore muscles after our first day of hard riding. Several days later we camped at Mercury Bay, so named by Captain James Cook when he spent some time there observing the eclipse of Mercury. He later went on to discover Botany Bay. After that we went on to a place called Hot Water Beach for reasons which are obvious. All one has to do was to wait for the tide to go out and then dig a hole in the sand. In places the water comes up so hot that you can’t step into it, well, unless you are a German. For some reason the Germans who were bathing there had a much higher tolerance to heat than the other bathers.

Our group has no formal name and we jokingly refer to ourselves as the Gourmet Cycling Club or Meals on Wheels. While we joke about the name we take food very seriously. We cooked for ourselves most of the time. Donna is an incorrigible shopper and stops at all roadside produce stalls to “puck up vittles” for the evening meal. One night we each had a sole individually cooked with a wonderful array of fresh vegetables. Other nights meals included baked hogget, vegetable pasta and curry and rice. Many of the meals were cooked in an enormous aluminium saucepan that I carried around with me.”