adventurethroughtravel: April 11th, Christchurch

We had a great workout at the gym and then walked around the downtown. It is great to see a downtown area that hasn’t been decimated by shopping malls. They also have old street cars riding on tracks through the down town area. In addition, New Zealanders must be the biggest coffee consumers in the world; they are even more coffee mad than Italians, Spaniards and Australians! There are coffee shops everywhere.

We stopped in a Triumph motor cycle dealership and the proprietors had set a world land speed record for a 1000 cc motorcycle with side car of 276 kph! He recently sold the bike to a double amputee from California who was a ski lift technician who lost both legs when a cable came off. The bike has only hand controls so he is going to try and set a new record at Daytona and the proprietor, Phil Garrett is flying over to help prep the bike.

We then went to the Brittan motorcycle museum which commemorates the Brittan motorcycle, the fastest motorcycle in the world in the early 90’s. He built everything himself, including casting all the motor parts. Everything was built out of carbon fiber. The bike was lighter, more powerful, better performing than all the best efforts of Ducatti, Yamaha, Honda and Kawasaki with their major factory teams. Today the fastest vehicles developed by these teams strongly resemble the early 90’s Brittans. It won at Daytona and held world records in top running speed, and quickest in the quarter mile! Unfortunately John Brittan died from a melanoma at 42 years of age; an engineering and inventive genius who had only begun to show his vision and creativity.