Years ago I used to rattle my way down the Ngauranga Gorge on my old Warehouse bike in Wellington on my way to work each day but its taken us a while to get biking as a family. Finally though we have the 5 of us set up on new bikes so the focus has now moved to finding great cycle tracks on the North Shore.
It turns out that there are quite a lot of them so we set out to explore one close to our home – the Unsworth Reserve to Rosedale Road route.
The thing I love about bike trails in Auckland is how unexpected they are. You move quickly from urban streets to well crafted boulavards that provide safe riding spaces for learning riders.
The biggest surprise for us was the tunnel under Upper Harbour Highway which got a lot of ride throughs from the kids.
Other easy bike rides we’d recommend are Orewa Estuary (8km if you go right about and flat except for one small hill) or heading under the Harbour Bridge – next to the police station off Stafford Road. There’s a great tunnel (perfect for shouting and getting awesome echos) and you can loop around through the tunnel, along the side of the motorway, under the harbour bridge and back again.