So, with a month and a day to go till we fly off to Auckland, the Rory Peck Trust’s page is now live, encouraging their supporters to chip in and sponsor our madcap 2000-mile tandem adventure to and through New Zealand.

With warm thanks to so many of you all, Jutta and I are already nearly half way to our target of £3000 for this wonderful cause – just £1 per kilometre. Still time to join in the fun….

Daisy2 (I’ll explain the 2 in a later post) is nearly ready, with rebuilt rear wheel (thanks Greg and his Dad Phil of Black Bikes in Sheringham – best bike shop in East Anglia), new brake cables, and a new German saddle for Jutta.

Yes, all the best gear is German, from Ortlieb panniers to Rohloff hub to front dynamo, with a bit of Shimano thrown in.

With her S&S couplings (OK, they’re American), Daisy is ready to be unbolted into front and back – bit like a pantomime horse, really – for her frame and attendant bits to be bundled into two separate bike boxes for the Emirates flight out to the planet’s bottom right-hand corner on Feb 3.

Are we fit and fully ready to go? Is the Pope a Scientologist?

The good news from my own past cycling adventures (liberally documented on this site with blogs going back especially to 2008 and my 4000 there-and-return miles to Budapest) is that one does gets sufficiently fit extraordinarily fast, usually in a week or so.

However, the first few hundred miles until one reaches that state can be, shall we say, interesting. Especially in ones mid-60s….

So, via Auckland and a couple of buses up to to the top, Cape Reinga (pronounced Ree-Ang-Ah – photos below of where it is, and of my last bikeless visit there with daughter Katie in 2011) here we come, ready to head back south all the way to Bluff over the following six weeks.