Prologue

I love Dave Lear but he is a prick. Sometime over the festive season he texted me to advise that he had dislocated a tendon on the middle finger of his right hand doing some kind of manual labour that he clearly shouldn’t have been doing. With the obvious implication that he could no longer do effective sign language, he would also not be able to ride a motorbike for a while. Especially not with the demands of off road riding. This had significant implications for our up coming South Island ride. Of course my readership is aware that our little group heads off on an off road trip around the south every year. This year we had planned to reverse the route so as to traverse the sections we had done before in the opposite direction to previous years. This would keep things fresh and we had a few new tracks in mind to keep things even fresher. Plenty to get excited about then. Unless you aren’t going. 

Both of us nursed the disappointment over the summer, a little easier for me as I was in full on “training” mode for a mountain biking trip to Queenstown. However, with the pedalling behind me I was able to fully focus my sadness that my friend was not joining us this year. 

That was until a week ago,when I got a cheery text, as if nothing was amiss, advising he would not only be riding with us but in his rightful place at the front. He had seen his doctor who armed him with a shopping trolley worth of drugs with a side of bravado. Apparently it’s an experiment to see whether analgesia and denial can overcome mechanical failure. I’m sure it will go well. Welcome to the Wrong way round.