A few more wines and dinner was characterised by some uncharacteristic but quite benign behaviour, although I will leave out a few photographs unsuited to World Wide Web viewing unless of course the subject wishes to show her behaviour to the world! The country's woes were all solved, but only if the capitalists accepted a social responsibility and a capital gains tax (excluding the home) and the socialists accepted more personal responsibility with effort, work and investment adequately compensated (which would still leave a gap, but a deserved one). All undoubtedly will deny any knowledge in the sober light of morning.

Day 5: (Friday 23rd Feb 2007) First stop is the actual Hyde Station which retains a building (privately owned), a few wagons and enough track for them to sit on. Rocky formations to the right (west) give an inkling of the craggy structures unseen in the mist further up in the Rock and Pillar range. We also passed a memorial pyramid to the 21 dead in the 1943 Hyde Train crash (well I certainly passed it without noticing it, but Alan stopped).

The last section from Rock and Pillar through Ngapuna and on to Middlemarch takes us from rough, steep rocky country onto irrigated farmland and then flat slightly boring plains.

Below are the "slightly boring plains". I amused myself by racing ahead of the echelon and setting up ready for action photographs of the considerably speedier team who usually arrived moments before I was quite ready. Dianne was boldly leading the way (doing "the Pull") with all but the stragglers selfishly sitting in her slipstream enjoying a relatively easy passage (drafting). Of course she could have asked the gentlemen to take a turn in the lead, but Dianne would hate any implication she wasn't as good as any man....boy, do I rave on, but as I said, the countryside was getting a bit monotonous...
I also realised that except for standing group shots, none of my photos included me, so I set up the camera on a rail and tried a few self-portraits riding up, using the remote. Pity about the Warehouse sports gear!

Middlemarch was reached, with the rain threatening. An interesting series of rock sculptures on the edge of town had my scientific mind frustrated with its lack of perspective - was this planned to make me accept disorder or had the artist not measured the distances accurately?

The Taylors discover Middlemarch has Cell-phone coverage....OK, but as for me, I wasn't ready to go back to civilization yet, in fact we never really left it properly so I was looking forward to heading into the mountains of Mt Aspiring National Park. To me, a real break from the stress of life means just that, a real break, switching right off to enjoy the beauty of nature unspoilt by worldly worries - the only concerns being not getting too many sandfly bites, taking some reasonable photos, cooking something edible, getting on with some good mates and getting out alive.