Wednesday 4 January 2006 – Martinborough - Feilding


Trip: SH2 – Martinborough – Featherston – Greytown – Carterton – Masterton – Eketahuna – Pahiatua – Mangatainoka – Woodville – SH3 – Ashurst – Bunnythorpe – Aorangi – Feilding

End Mileage: 174898

Start Mileage: 174727

Distance Travelled: 171

Up and showered by 8:45am (seems to be no such thing as a sleep in while in BILITY), anyway pays to be up and away early to use the “facilities”.

We stopped for a café breakfast in Greytown – Main St Deli and a short walk around “town”. Left there about 10:20am and off to Carterton – well it is only 7 km down the road so not much of an adventure getting there. We stopped at the Paua Shop and Rex got some paua rounds and shell shapes to use in his turning. Seems bizarre having a shop selling all types of paua bits and pieces but it works so I guess why not. People were really friendly in the shop. Left there about 11:10am.

Next stop was 11:20am at the Mobil station in Masterton for diesel, didn’t want to get stuck on the road with no go-juice, I for one wouldn’t be “pushing” BILITY anywhere.

Off back on SH2 over Mt Bruce and then to Eketahuna.

Alert alert – on the Mt Bruce road, going UP, we PASSED another vehicle (going the same way we were). Wooo hooooo, a momentous occasion but unfortunately missed the photo opportunity.

Got to the buzzing metropolis of Eketahuna at noon but didn’t stop, at least this time it was sunny.



Back into Mangatainoka and this time there was no tree across the road AND the shop was open. So we stopped to have a look – quite disappointing really but at least it meant we didn’t buy anything so that was a cheap stop.

Lots of water so the rivers were very high and muddy:


Made it to Woodville by 1pm and then on to SH3. From there we went up to the Te Apiti Windfarm over the Saddle Road to the Ashurst and Palmerston North Road. Had a good look at the windfarm at the top of the Saddle Road – quite spectacular and surprisingly noisy from the windmills!







Te Apiti Wind Farm

The Te Apiti wind farm is located on the north side of the Manawatu Gorge, in the North Island, 10km from the city of Palmerston North.

The first site development work started on 10 November 2003. First electricity was generated at an opening ceremony on the 5 August 2004.

Construction of all fifty five 1.65 MW turbines was completed on 30 October 2004 and the site was officially opened by the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, on the 9 December.

The total installed capacity of 90 MW now generates enough clean, sustainable electricity to meet the annual electricity needs of approximately 45,000 average Kiwi homes.

Te Apiti Statistics:

Then down the other side and at 2pm we’d made it to JR’s in Feilding – woo hoo. Great trip to get to here and now we can stay put for a few days and Rex can play with bits of wood. YAY.

We unpacked Rex’s turning gear first – it was quite surprising how much of this he’d gotten into BILITY as he did this before I turned up at his place! Bits kept on coming out from all sorts of nooks and crannies. He then got himself set up on a lathe and of course the start of many gossip sessions with the lads that were there, not that all of them had turned up when we got there.

Dick Veitch (and Bella) were there from Rex’s club and also Guilio Marcolongo from Philip Island.

The first night (after a fish and chip dinner) we all sat around and some of the lads had pictures of pieces they’d made and everyone introduced themselves.

After the introductions Stuart Camp (from Christchurch) came over to me and said he knew me. I couldn’t remember him at all but ends up he had been to dinner at Riddell Road and was married to Rosalie Pearce who I went to ATI with – wow, small world.

The organisers (Gordon, JR, Trevor) had put everyone into teams of three to work on The Collaboration Project – the teams were all randomly selected and they had to collaboratively make a piece that had 3 basic rules:

Funnily enough after the introductions and chit-chats some of the lads continued to turn. ;-)


Links

East Cape and Feilding index page

BILITY home page

Ta Apiti Wind Farm