Our Scottish friends were among the lucky ones. Their house in Christchurch had escaped serious damage.
And having inspected it, helped friends clean up their homes and ascertained there was little more they could do in the meantime to help out, they decided they would proceed with a long-hatched plan to come south and ride the Otago Central Rail Trail.
So it was that last Friday, the dark clouds of devastation at their backs, they made their way to our rendezvous in Middlemarch.
They had arrived at Christchurch airport very early in the morning for the flight to Dunedin to find it had been cancelled. They opted to drive.
It wasn't without misgiving or an itch of guilt that we all embarked that afternoon - some hours later than we had envisaged and thus from Hyde, 30km down the track - on our two-wheeled frolic.
To this decision we applied liberal dollops of rationalising emollient: there was no point us all sitting around wringing our hands; the world could not stand still; normality, people doing the things they had been planning to do, was good; the economy, whether there, here or in Central Otago, had to keep turning. And so on.
But if there was one thing that was certain, the tragic events of Tuesday a week ago would remain with us.
I came upon the first reminder not a few kilometres down the track with a lone rider who had come south from Whangarei to do the track with friends from Christchurch and Australia. Though there was little she could do without water or power, not unnaturally the Christchurch friend felt compelled to stay in the city. The Australian friends, due to fly into Christchurch, had cancelled.
Their loss was our gain, for in the lone rider from Whangarei, whose accommodation over the next three nights coincided with our own, we made a new friend.
This was to become one of the features of the trail: shared endeavour, swapped stories of the way ahead or behind, of geographical features, man-made monuments or suitable sites for a caffeine fix - and, indeed, of friends, relatives and damaged homes in Christchurch - cemented instant camaraderie.
At Waipiata we met a gentleman from Ohio, a retired classical musician, a tall thin septuagenarian, who told us of his arrival in the country on the morning of the quake.
When the quaking stopped, busloads of international arrivals were taken to a nearby airport hotel and given blankets - presumably to keep people warm and calm nerves.
But when a shuttle came by, headed some distance south, perhaps to Ashburton or some such town - our American friend's grasp on New Zealand geography was a little uncertain - he hopped aboard and told the driver he was headed for Dunedin.
The driver phoned some contacts in the transport business and, further down the highway, with the inter-city bus about to arrive, set our man down to catch a bus all the way.
''Only in New Zealand,'' said our Scottish friends.
In the pub at Oturehua we met and chatted to people from Redcliffs in Christchurch, a suburb badly hit. Their house had been damaged, but they, too, felt a few days away while emergency teams worked to reconnect power and water was the best thing they could do.
They were calm and stoic, like others we met, spoke to or heard from over those few days.
Stopping to check emails in Ranfurly, I read the graphic account of one friend: ''I was in the third floor of a 100-year-old building. The walls were flexing, panels started coming down from the roof. The wall behind me was flexing and looked like it would collapse. Exposed water pipes that ran along the high ceiling ruptured, spraying water everywhere.
''As I left the building, I could see plumes of dust rising up over the central city ... I rode through the centre ... dust, water and mud from liquefaction, and devastation. All the old buildings had lost masonry or collapsed completely, cars crushed, power lines down, bridge knocked out, huge rents in the earth and the roads, trees uprooted, street lamps dangling ...''
A text from another friend simply said they had lost their home and their car but were better off than many.
Meanwhile, we continued our ride into the past.
''New Zealand as it used to be 50 years ago,'' said one person we met.
She was alluding to the fact that no-one locked their houses, bicycles were left unchained in sheds, drinks in the accommodation along the way operated on an honesty box basis, and almost without exception people encountered were friendly and generous.
It is the kind of spirit that Christchurch, by and large, is experiencing as it begins to contemplate how it will rebuild.
As it does, it should find a place for the offbeat imagination and the lateral thinkers.
For the plan to create a rail trail through Central Otago was first received with a degree of incredulity. It is now a phenomenal success and has brought new life to depleted, time-worn communities, and totally revived others.
• Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
