It’s pure peace.

Like I’m living inside a meditation tape, I hear only the soothing waves of the sea. Open my eyes and I’m still there – perched on a driftwood log, watching the tide slide out of Tasman Bay on New Zealand’s South Island. To the right, the last sliver of sun clings to the mountains we conquered a few days ago, en route from the mountain biking paradise of the Marlborough Sounds. To the left, the vast, rocky wilderness of Abel Tasman National Park – tomorrow’s quest – stretches northward into the water. Down the middle, a 75-km-wide horizon ebbs and flows at its own lazy pace into the open ocean.

I’m on Kina Beach, in a perfect spot I may never see again. Before me are the ruins where briefly stood an ingenious stic k fort that our sons, aged 8 and 6, constructed as a fleeting testament to our presence. Our family tandem bicycles – one parent and one kid on each – are parked next to our tent just ten metres behind me, resting for our next expedition. We’ve claimed this space for tonight, and in the morning we’ll leave it for someone else to discover. We’re modern explorers, without the colonialism… or (thanks to Joce’s veggie obsession) the scurvy.

Like Columbus and Cartier, we thrive on discovery. Every day on our bike tour across New Zealand and Australia is entirely different – an exhilarating and endless cycle of new scenery, experiences and friendships. The maps we pored over for months before this six-month family Oceania Odyssey come instantly alive with our newfound familiarity and a lifetime of memories.

In New Zealand we visited Ship’s Cov e, where Captain James Cook first set a European boot on what the Maori had been calling Te Aotearoa for 500 years (since the legendary traveller Kupe actually discovered the place). Too bad Cook didn’t bring his bicycle – he could have seen much more of this remarkable land.

Exploring new countries on two wheels is pure magic. Instead of taking hundred-dollar tours to see wildlife, we glimpse it from our backroad-and-cycletrail perches: the elusive white heron spearing fish on west coast glacier rivers; endangered yellow-eyed penguins from a grass-covered hide as they emerge from their feast at sea to return to their nests; and kangaroos nibbling breakfast in the bush camp site we reached by an old fire track.

Our greatest discoveries have been found through the advice of locals we meet along the way, who are intrigued by our bike set-up and strike up conversation. In a campervan we would have flown right past Nikau Caves, on a dirt road well outside Auckland, en route to the glitzier Waitomo. But a woman we met camping in Shekinah – also way off the main path – tipped us to this rugged tour (given just for us by the farmer whose land the caves are beneath) squeezing through crevices and wading knee-deep through underground lakes to the cavern lair of thousands of glow worms.

One night, a month later, we stopped at Curio Bay where we heard that dolphins come close to shore on rare occasion. We arrived just before sunset (happily now at about 5pm, so the boys don’t have to stay up late to catch all the dusk-time animal viewing) and saw nothing for a half-hour. Then Sitka and Heron started dancing and singing for the dolphins to come out and play. “That’s cute,” thought Ed, not believing two bouncing boys could sumon wild sea mammals with song – until a dozen or more Hector’s dolphins popped out of nowhere, not 15 metres off the beach, and began surfing the waves as they crashed on the shore. They put on an hour-long show better than any aquarium stage, leaping and spinning about, as Heron and Sitka put on a show for them too, screeching and leaping in the air every time the dolphins surfaced.

More often than not we’re the only human presence on a trail, campsite or back road – alone with the sounds of conversing tui birds or guffawing cockatoos. Maybe, we think, like our European ancestors, we should plant our family flag in these spots and name them after family members, as though the footprints under the dirt never existed.

Heron Hill.

Sitka Stream.

Daddy Island.

Mommyville.

We’ve felt the exhilarating thrill of a successful expedition each afternoon when we discover our destination – and on that sunny day at Bluff when our tires reached the southernmost tip of New Zealand, 3,400km from when we left Cape Reinga at the northernmost point.

“We did it!” cried the boys. “What’s next?”

Each night we look up at the stars (now appearing by 5:30pm as the southern winter approaches) outside our small nylon home, breathe deeply and wonder about who else is out there looking back at us. Tomorrow we’ll find new lands beneath our bike tires and new worlds all around us. We’ll go places we’ve never been, and see things we may never see again.

Then we’ll stop for frisbee and ice cream, and leave those places for the next explorer family.

Take that, Captain Cook.

When we stop for groceries on a family cycling tour, the whole store knows it. After biking, camping and running wild in wide open spaces for a few days, our feral boys charge through the aisles like they’ve been licking moss off rocks on a deserted island for a month, ecstatically shouting out the names of every item in sight. All those calories going out into pedalling must come back in, and they are eager participants in our family meal plan.

By the numbers: an average day of our family food intake

• 1 three-litre pot of oatmeal, with 2 apples, 2 mangoes, 20 dates and 1 cup of pumpkin seeds

• 4 bananas

• 4 protein bars (our NZ faves are “One Square Meal” super bars)

• 4 plums

• 4 oranges

• 8 carrots

• 1 cucumber

• 2 bell peppers

• 1 package of hummus

• 8-16 peanut butter / jam rice cake sandwiches

• 1.5 pounds of gorp (souped-up trail mix)

• 1 basket of fries / 2 triple-scoop ice cream cones / whatever we can find at the local cafes

• 1 stop worth of fresh fruit from roadside stands / “honesty boxes”

• 1 three-litre pot of gluten-free pasta with 2 heads of broccoli, 4 tomatoes, and a package of marinated tofu

• 12-16 litres of water

• Plus a snack pig-out by Ed after bedtime if there’s a camp store (exact quantities too embarrassing to list here… though it is rumoured that Ed did purchase EIGHTY spring rolls on a recent binge)

Over the years we’ve found that if Joce does the shopping, she comes out with 30 pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables, a big bag of nuts and one box of pasta. If Ed heads in, it’s 30 pounds of pasta, potato chips and powdered donuts. So Joce ends up doing the shopping.

Our big challenge is getting enough fuel for four very active pedallers to avoid bonking (running out of glycogen) before the next grocery stop (every 2-3 days), while having enough room to fit it all in our panniers, and managing to stay healthy on this epic six-month bike marathon. As our boys have gotten older, we’ve added a spare 15-litre dry bag to pack on top of our already heaping racks, knowing that the extra weight will abate as we gorge.

As we teach the boys French en route, our first phrase to learn was “J’ai faim,” because they’re by far the most-heard words while pedalling (we soon added “très” and “beaucoup”). Our heaping breakfasts last only minutes on the road before Sitka starts asking about lunch. They’re not the only insatiable ones – Ed is often caught hovering over the boys’ meals wondering if they’re full yet so he can snag the leftovers.

We’ve been lucky in New Zealand and Australia to regularly match our home diet of vegan / vegetarian, gluten-free,  and low-glycemic options (can you tell one of us just graduated as a naturopathic doctor?), though we’ve learned to be flexible when our rumbling bellies insist (or very generous new friends offer intriguing local delicacies).

Fortunately for Ed, who tends to lose 10 pounds the minute he puts on bike shorts, and even more as he cycles, these delightful offerings happen strikingly often in New Zealand. Ed has temporarily put aside decades of vegetarianism to become our designated family gratitude eater: freshly caught snapper; home-grown ground venison; a mammoth package of fish, chips and sausages; and heaps of assorted, doughy desserts. We’ve also been treated to delicious vegetarian dishes – curries, lentil loaves and filling salads – for the whole family to enjoy.

So the boys, despite their reports of constant hunger, are gaining height/weight and thriving on a steady (and substantial) diet of greens, plums, oats and gorp. Given their endless stores of energy that get them bounding about in full-on play mode even after a full day’s ride, we’ll continue letting them loose in grocery stores to help pick out the next load of cycle-family fare. Watch out, shoppers!

 

The drizzle started lightly in late afternoon, as we hummed along gorgeous countryside south of Dargaville on New Zealand’s North Island.

Then the skies opened up and wreaked a mighty wrath of downpour that didn’t let up. We were drenched through our rain jackets even before we hit a long gravel road that quickly became a mud pit. All four wheels on our two tandem bicycles were rubbing and slurping with caked-on slop, and our parental resolve to stay positive eroded with each new hill and turn until we were muttering curse words to ourselves, both yearning for and dreading our arrival and inevitable tent-making in the teeming storm.

But our sons, Heron (8) and Sitka (6) didn’t notice the fouling of our mood – they were too busy recounting every detail they’d learned earlier in the day at the Dargaville Museum (the impromptu stop we made at Heron’s insistence). Each time we were forced to dismount and push in the sloppy sludge, they became Heron and Sitka Land-Gillovich, immigrant gumdiggers from Croatia in the early 20th century, seeking their fortune in the pooling muck. Being shown a sopping pile of sandstone goo every few minutes was sufficiently adorable to defuse our grump and keep us slogging on.

The boys’ merry karma served us well. We arrived after nightfall at the campground, resigned to erect our tent on a concrete slab under an awning, when a red truck pulled up. Ernie said his wife Sylvia had told him to go fetch the miserable-looking family she spotted from the window of their summer vacation home, and bring them in for a night’s reprieve in their spare bedrooms. It was a lovely evening with new friends, freshly picked avocados and hot Milo for the boys, who slept instantly and happily with dreams of Kauri gum dancing in their heads.

We’ve lost track of how many people tell us they stopped traveling after they had kids. Sure, we go a little slower than we did without our added passengers (not much, really, now that they’ve started pedalling, too). But we see much more, learn much more, and have way more fun –all four of us.

We started our “Cape to Bluff” (north tip to south tip) ride across New Zealand with 240 other cyclists, who coincidentally were launching their Tour Aotearoa at the same time as us. With only a mini-tent, bag of protein bars and credit card, they were aiming to finish in 10 to 25 days. We had three months.

So while our uber-fit new friends were sweating 200km a day, we were stopping to run obstacle courses on schoolyard play structures. Or improving our frisbee skills. Or playing shark-eat-fish in the campground swimming pool.

We encounter a lot of curiosity on our rest stops about how the boys are “getting on.” At first, we cringed when strangers asked, “So what do you fellas think of Mom and Dad lugging you around on those bikes?” But without fail they grin big and say, “We LOVE it!”

In fact, on the days we stop and rest our weary bike butts, the boys inevitably ask when we’ll start biking again. One time, they actually used their birthday money stash to rent a pair of kids’ bikes from the campground, so they wouldn’t go a day without cycling.

We’ve also had many inquiries about what we’re doing for the boys’ schooling. We say we’re “world-schooling” – the road is their classroom, and every day is a field trip. So far we’ve learned about glaciers, volcanoes and caves; sheep, kiwi birds and kangaroos; history, geography and politics (with a tour of New Zealand’s parliament). That’s in addition to the five hours a day of on-bike Q&A, on whatever topic piques the boys’ interest that day – from the digestive system and how milk is made, to evolution and the history of European explorers.

At a recent visit to a bike shop to get some repairs done, the boys stunned the owner by asking how much his mark-up was, leading to an educational discussion about margins and the economics of the bicycle business.

In the end, however, it’s seeing the world from a child’s eyes that brings the most benefits when cycling with your kids. In the middle of nasty steep climbs, our sons start cheering, “Go Daddy go!” Every stone wall is a balance beam, every tree root is a hurdle to jump over, every pile of driftwood is a fort, and every beach is an elaborate kingdom with castles and moats waiting to be built.

On one particularly rainy morning, we woke up to a drenched tent and wet rain jackets. Trying to be playful, Ed adapted the words to the Lego movie song, Everything is Awesome:

Midway through Daddy’s ranting rap about everything that was soaked, Sitka interrupted.

 “No Daddy, it’s…

Which he sang while running around in circles in his raincoat, revelling in the raindrops.

Just try being a grump after that.