Book the Arrowtown Bike Ride. Assume Something Will Break.

Thirteen miles, four and a half hours, through Arrowtown and out along the cliffs above Queenstown at the peak of the fall colour. On paper that is a generous amount of time for a very easy ride. I want to tell you why it isn’t, and why you should book it anyway.

My chain broke three times.

The first two I got back on the gears myself and lost a few minutes each. The third time it didn’t slip, it broke outright, which is a different and much less optional kind of problem. We called it in, sat on the side of a New Zealand cliff road, and a replacement bike came out to us. Then we kept going.

The thing worth knowing before you book

That four-and-a-half-hour window is sized for a ride where nothing happens. Ours had three mechanical failures and a roadside wait in it and we still finished — but only because we weren’t trying to make anything afterwards.

So: take the earliest slot you can get, and do not schedule anything tight on the other end of it. The ride is thirteen miles and mostly flat; the variable isn’t your legs, it’s whether the bike holds together. Ours didn’t, and that turned out to be a completely normal amount of mechanical failure for a rental — the company treated the whole thing as routine, which tells you something.

Book the pickup at the end. We did, and it’s the difference between a ride and a morning.

The part I’d actually plan the day around

Because here’s what the pickup gets you: brunch, at the end, with no bikes to return and nowhere to be.

Matt ordered a Hugo Spritz. I got an espresso martini. Alex got a Bloody Mary. Nobody planned that lineup, it just happened, and Matt’s read on it stuck with me — it felt like the perfect encapsulation of us. Three people, three completely different drinks, one bike that had spent the morning actively trying to fall apart, and none of us particularly bothered about any of it.

And one broader thing, since I’d been wrong about it for the whole trip: New Zealand’s food is better than you are expecting it to be. Consistently better than what we’d had in Sydney, better than expected almost everywhere we went, and this brunch kept the streak going. Shishito peppers, sliders, and I genuinely could not tell you what else.

I don’t remember exactly what I ordered. I remember the chain breaking three times and still thinking, halfway through that espresso martini, that it was one of the better mornings of the whole trip.

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