My partner and I have gravel bikes and we both got wheels built up using these Funnrun rims.  I’ve had light bike rims and they are good, but they are now pretty pricey.

The funnrunn ones, I got 32 hole 35mm deep and built the up with dt hubs.  They weight in at 1600gm and are completely bomb proof.  25mm internals and run tubeless.  Totally transformed my ride.

Got my partner the 28-hole ones and same good quality.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005160317736.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.74.5a941802wCW8I9

Running 40c tires

You did the right thing seeking treatment.  I had a tick bite a couple of years ago which I didn’t notice.  Riding the bike through scrub in the south of France.  A couple of days later it blew up in the classic lymes bulls eye on my leg.  Went to a doctor in France and he was straight on it, ah mr you have a souvenir of your holiday…maladie du lymes.  21 days of amoxicillin at 1000mg 3 x day.  while on the treatment I started getting sore feet and then later arthritis in my ankles, wrists and elbows.  This was bad at first but has got milder, but never gone away.  Apparently there used to be a vaccine for lymes and it would be great if that was bought back.  I was lucky in getting the classic symptom and having a doc that knew what it was, but often the case that doesn’t happen

Take it as checked luggage.

As for bringing a bike into NZ, they aren’t that anal about how clean it is.  Just make sure there isn’t mud all over it and tell them you cleaned it.  I just pack it in a bike box and open it for the agricultural inspectors and they have a quick look at the tyres and under the seat.  They won’t be pulling it out and checking it.  This is my experience on the 20 times I have bought a bike back to nz

Ibis Ripmo

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Full Member

The road from St André les Alpes  > Castellane > Moustiers Ste Marie is a spectacular drive, it might however be quite busy during the holiday season.

bloody narrow and full of those oversized camper vans! Nightmare through some of those villages and the gorges along that road!!!

The road from St André les Alpes  > Castellane > Moustiers Ste Marie is a spectacular drive, it might however be quite busy during the holiday season.

yes I have and there were a fair few trails

you might have to format the SSD first before it shows up.  Then one of these freeware or demos folk are mentioning

That’s really sad news and I stayed at his pub back in 2002-03.  He was a really nice guy and super humble and gave us a blow by blow description of the rides in the area.  RIP John

Ironically the previous labour govt decided that prohibition on smoking was the way forth, but they also put forwards a referendum on legalising weed, so they could accept that the war on drugs failed for weed, but they felt they could win the war on drugs on tobacco.  Ya can’t have it both ways.  New govt is not making it easier to get ciggies, but they just canned a project that would have failed anyway (the last govt was great at talking a big story, then failing to deliver).

The last govt decided to borrow $90B and then sprayed the $$ everywhere with bugger all to show for it, so the new govt has to rein in govt spending and attempt to deal with the debt mountain they inherited.

The voters decided that the previous govt was pretty pants and from the labour victory with 52% of the vote in 2020, they crashed on the current election to 26%.  This is the biggest crash in voting in the 30 year history of MMP in NZ, so shows how unpopular the previous govt was.

Unfortunately many younger New Zealanders have decided to move overseas with ~2% of the population leaving in the last year.  They are many young people 20-30, skilled and qualified and maybe they will go back, but maybe they won’t.  Not good for NZ in the long term.

Thanks folks!  Yep I have used light bikes before, but their prices have crept up and there seem to be plenty of other offerings on aliexpress, but as with others I’m slightly wary.

I was wondering if anyone had got some from aliexpress or alternatives to Lightbicyles

@mugboo  I don’t think so, but the guys we rode with were fast plus did some drops I wasn’t keen on!  Such a good scene there, apart from the place being over run by French tourists and Dutch campers

Yep I’m pretty sure the bus still goes up Semnoz.  We did the same as @Mugboo and asked some French riders at the top who said follow us and hit up some good trails.  That was 8 years ago and we still ride with these French guys when we visit the area.

If you are travelling through Hokitika on the West Coast of the South Island, the heli trip these guys do is amazing.  They fly you up to a glacier in a very remote part of the South Island which is way off the beaten track

https://www.precisionhelitours.com/

Saints or 4 pot XTs with finned pads and 203mm rotors helps.  I also think resin over metal pads as the metal ones can really heat up

Same, 5.6BG on my mac running Safari.  Alert keeps popping up, do you want to store 2GB of data.  Pretty damn annoying

@muddylegs Yes I think that is it. Basically I got Lymes disease which I got treated very promptly but at the end of the antibiotic treatment the arthritis started. I’d never had this before and the doc thinks the Lymes is responsible

Biking shoes. I use those shimano enduro shoes, so they are moderately stiff

Wow, thanks for all the information and some of those stories are pretty intense. Mine is definitely at the lower end of the scale, but still bloody annoying having gone from no real health issues to this.

I’m taking all the supplements, fish oil, glucosamine, turmeric , Vitamin B complex and resvetrol. Def checking out the shoe inserts and those hot/cold therapies sound good.

Thanks guys!

I ended up buying a 2nd hand HP Z8 with 2 x Xeon Gold 6152 processors for USD1900. This should run along a bit quicker and the CPU benchmark test it estimates twice as fast.
+faster DDR4 ram
+PCIe SSDs on the mother board

Thanks for the comments and the Z820 is getting on a bit now and has 1 NVMe drive in it for a working data drive, and C drive is run from an SSD.

The programmes I use use multi threading and I’m familiar with Xeon processors, but noticed that the AMD RRyzen CPUs have some pretty fast speeds, but that might not translate into a speed bump for some of the apps I use.

More than likely to go with a Z8 as I can pick up a 2nd hand unit for a decent price. It will also be able to run the C drive from a PCIe NVMe which will help things. I’m guessing that the DDR4 2666MHz ram is a bit quicker than the DDR3 I’m currently running.

I have been pretty impressed with these HP workstations and they are pretty robust and the only problem I’ve had is a power supply failing. Added an upgraded GPU, more ram and swapped the processors out for some 12 core units about 3 years ago.

Cloud is good, but even with 500mbit up and down internet big file transfers take a while and its good to have everything at hand.

@wbo. Yep lots of modelling work designing 3D surveys and gridding and mapping xyz grids.

@Jamz, yer being going hard out on the probiotics too.

Thanks for all the comments. The initial antibiotic does was a large one and was prescribed by a doc in France, but my doctor at home who has dealt with Lymes said that would have killed the bacteria and there is little point in getting a blood test. I’m thinking it is a matter of time in terms of getting better and I can still ride, but can get pretty tired and sore afterwards. It is better than it was about a month ago…..or maybe I’m just getting old

Finished the antibiotics about 6 weeks ago and no Lymes symptoms while on those, but only after I finished them. I’ve been on antibiotics before and never had any issues with them, although this was a fairly hefty dose of them.

Top tip would be to go to NZ in their summer, so December-April and not in mid-winter. Winters can be cold wet and very muddy if you are planning to ride a bike.

I’ve been riding in the French Alps for the last 3 weeks and man oh man has it been dusty. How have the Morzine tracks been holding up given the high traffic they get. I was in Meribel and it was dust city, but way less riders so the trails were still in good nick, but I’m curious about Morzine this year

I’m running Saints and I’m over 100kg. I do run the ice tech rotors when doing long downhills such as the Alps’ ones and I do think it makes a difference. Less fade and they don’t heat up so bad.

For normal riding, I don’t think there is much difference though.

They cost more and wear out quicker, which are the down sides

@seabadger, yer you’d think it would be OK to walk your bike.

Ha! makes it a big hard to link up to Col Sapin on the short uphill (1km section) going SW on the TMB from Tsa de Sacheron. Surely riding that short section to reach Col Sapin and continue down the valley staying off the prohibited paths should be OK?

At least the section back towards Switzerland is open

Thanks @Grump Funny how you blank out how big those climbs can be!I remember the Val Veny balcony trail drop down to the Rifugio was a fair distance and thinking it would be a far old push back up, but it would be a good option. Thanks for the info and roll on riding there and Aosta in early August

@Grump. I have ridden up the Val Veny balcony trail from Courmayuer and the downhill to Rifugio Combal would be a fair push back up. From reading the Arette notice from last year that track seemed to be out of bounds over summer. One thing about that trail is the absolutely stunning views of Mont Blanc and the glacier. Just stunning. We are visiting from Aosta so were keen for a day ride up there, hence the questions on Val Feret as that is the one I think we will do.

@Grump thanks for the information and its always great to have some on the ground knowledge!

Thanks for the information @Grump. Just to clarify, if I ride clockwise ( SW) from Col Ferret along on the Val Feret balcony trail (TMB) but I’ll turn off at Arminaz Desot and head up to Tze de Secheron and over Col Sapin and then down to Courmayeur?

I rode the balcony section on Val Veny back in 2019 and stunning views, but we came back down the road and there was a lot of vertical lost on asphalt, so I wasn’t so keen to revisit that one, but the Val Feret trail was one I wanted to do.

OK thanks for the information and I set up MS Remote Desktop and also Tailscale. Tailscale was easy to set up and looks pretty secure.

I see it creates a custom IP address for the client and the server and is there anything else I need to do on the logged in computer to make sure no remote work port is sitting open?

On the advance settings tab of RD Connection do I leave it as automatically detect RD Gateway Setting or change it to ” Use these RD Gateway server settings”

Thanks for all the info. I’m a free lance consultant so my Workstation and NAS box are set up in the office at home, so the IT dept is me.
Sounds like the MS remote desktop and using a VPN is the way to go.

Any recommendations for a VPN that is easy to set up and I probably only need it for a few months while travelling? I’ve used one on my laptop when travelling, but that was only for browsing, so I don’t know a lot about setting one up between two computers so any recommendations would be appreciated.

Thanks guys!

@joshvegas thanks for that, I had seen that and will check that out too. Sounds like you have a similar situation to me.

City Council trail map

A NZ winter isn’t the same as a UK winter and there is generally no snow and temps are more like a British summer. In chch expect cold mornings, but still sunny days with the temps in the low teens.

There is plenty of riding up on the port hills City Council trail map

Plus there is the adventure park there with a chairlift and 400m vertical.

In regards to parallels, I have been running that on my 16″ MBP which has a I9 and 32GB of ram and run some geological modelling software on it. It goes really well, but not quite as well as the HP workstation with two 12-core Xeon processors and 128GB of ram.

I was genuinely impressed with how well the MacBook copes with parallels as my earlier experience wasn’t great

I can’t get the linking to work, but here is the url

https://ibb.co/kBS3Qth