Quite how we’re going to get all of this (and more, out of frame, though not the bed) into four panniers, one barrel bag and one handlebar bag is perhaps a question for Iniduoh – Houdini in reverse (terrible joke).But yesterday in two weeks, Feb 3, Jutta (hoping by then for recovery from a nasty post-cold lung infection) and I take Qantas flight via Dubai and Brisbane for Auckland.

Thankfully, Qantas allow up to 35 kg per person as check-in luggage, so DaisyTwo (post coming here in due course about the name) will be packed and taken with us wrapped up in just one Cycle Touring Club plastic bag just as her sister Raven has now twice flown the same stretch.

Easier than cardboard bike boxes, quicker to pack (handlebars to one side, pedals off, tyres down to half pressure)……and certainly quicker to reassemble at the airport at the other end, as Raven below in Queenstown in late 2012. We continue to be thrilled by the donations coming in for the Rory Peck Trust, at £1,324.82 now nearly half way to our target of £3000, or one £ for each kilometre we intend to pedal, from Cape Reinga at the top to Bluff at the bottom.

Nearly fully packed, DaisyTwo looks like this, from a Bank Holiday trip around Norfolk in May last year, though in the Kiwi late summer sunshine Jutta with luck won’t need to be so warmly attired.

She (Daisy, that is, not Jutta) has been nicely tuned up by Black Bikes, with rebuilt rear wheel, new brake cables, and a new USB charger which runs off the front dynamo, and we have high hopes that she will carry us faithfully south without too much of the drama pictured below.

Then, still as Sunshine in a previous incarnation and on her first long-distance tour, she blew a back tyre at speed downhill on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Levering a new tyre (thankfully we had a spare) onto that back wheel required no little help from fellow passing cycle-borne pilgrims.