It seems that this winter has been unusually warm here in Christchurch. Once again we had northerlies in the forecast bringing with them temperatures around twenty degrees Celsius (upper sixties Fahrenheit) so we skipped the ski slopes again in favour of another trip on our bikes.
This time we went to Bottle Lake Forest Park, this 800 hectare forest just north of Christchurch is a commercial forest that is also open to the public for biking and running. We started heading out through the forest on logging roads which eventually took us out to the beach.
After heading through the dunes we rode along the beach for a while. With the tide being out we had plenty of hard sand to ride on, but the strong northerly winds made progress quite slow.
After a while we decided to leave the beach behind and head back into the forest.
Once back in the forest we were able to pick up one of the designated mountain bike tracks and had a great time riding the undulating track through the trees.
As the forest is still managed for timber we rode through various ages of forest which meant that the mountain bike track was constantly changing. We had a great afternoon out and are both looking forward to coming back out here, maybe on a slightly less windy day!