Day 19 – Invercargill

Another wondeful day. I was up early for a bit of a walk around downtown Invercargill. Another lovely clean city.
We went to church at City Impact Church which I’d seen on my walk. It was a good service and we enjoyed ourselves. Downtown afterwards we were approached by a bloke and his wife who were interested in the motorhome so we talked to them for a while and it turned out that he rode a Suzuki Volucia 800 and had known Burt Munro. He pointed us to the beach where Munro did a lot of his speed trials; it goes on for miles:

He also told us where the actual bike was so Norma insisted we go and see it 🙂 There it was, in a hardware shop along with Munro’s 500cc Velcoette (?). What an amazing thing to get up close and personal with those bikes.

    

There was an old guy there who knew Munro from the early days and we had a good chat; he reckoned the man was mad.
The owner of the shop came and spent quite a bit of time with me.

 

His Dad had had a lot to do with the whole affair and he’d bought the bikes off Munro not long before he died. He known Munro from his earliest childhoodand  also affirmed that the man was quite mad.

So if you’re ever in Invercargil (one ‘l’ to save ink) get along to E Hayes Hardware on Dee Street and walk down the back past all the other old bikes and bits and you’ll see a piece of history.
If you’re not into bikes, well just ignore all the preceeding, but I reckon you’re quite mad :))

From there we went out to Bluff

 

 and then continued on our way, heading East for 20klms or so to Fortrose where we free parked for the night.

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