Friendly and patient tour guide - Gordon was a friendly and helpful host. We were all new to riding e bikes. Gordon was very patient and gave clear directions., The bikes were all set for each of us. A generous afternoon tea was provided. We thoroughly enjoyed our ride.

Not Quite What We Expected But a Good Day All the Same - Gordon picked us up at our Airbnb and we parked at the Auckland Domain and took off from there. I don’t think Gordon has a standard route set up for this tour, instead playing it by ear depending on who shows up and their level of fitness and particular sights they might want to see. And that would lead us into some difficult places and sections to ride, with fairly technical twists and turns that in the end would lead to four of the five of us getting injured in some fashion. I was the first to go down as we approached a steep hill, I was in lower e-power and figured I’d just use the bikes gears to get me up the grade. When I shifted, it missed the shift causing me to lurch off the saddle and when I went to plant my left leg to stabilize, the weight of the bike (50 or pounds) pushed me over and I landed on my left side, lightly banging my helmeted head on the street curb. We would later discover that the missed shift was due to a badly repaired shifter cable but this wouldn’t be my last encounter with badly maintained rental bikes. As for the others, my sister would slash her left arm open on a bridge railing, Marty would tangle with some nasty bougainvillea, and Kim would crash off a narrow-elevated path in wooded area with a father and son coming in the opposite direction proved to difficult to maneuver past. But, even with all of that, it was a fun and sometimes spectacular ride, one that took us all the way to the harbor and even back to where Kim had crashed so that we could, quite luckily, recover her phone which had slipped out of her pocket during her encounter with the undergrowth. And we got lucky at the end as the skies that had been threatening all day opened just as we were climbing back to Auckland Domain, where we huddled in the van drinking sodas and homemade cookies and brownies Gordon provided. In the end we covered twenty-eight miles of a big part of Auckland and would come away with a bunch of memories to share.