Leigh-Ann Crane

Moving up the models

She’s now riding her fourth big bike.

Her Shovelhead was sold to a Japanese collector. “It wasn’t practical”. 

A Harley Davidson Sporty 1200 replaced it. 

Next she saddled up on a CVO Fat Boy she christened Freedom. 

The name was inspired by a moonless, midnight ride dodging shadows through the Waioeka Gorge.

"He's got a sore puku at the moment".  

She’s presently riding a 2022 Indian Springfield. Leigh-Ann bought her last year as a 60th birthday present to herself and  fittingly calls her Free Spirit.

“She is just the best bike. We’ve done nearly 30,000kms together.”

Route 66, Ulysses member

She’s ridden America’s famed Route 66 with a pillion passenger holding on tight. “What a blast that was.” 

 The ride was a follow-on from 10 days of partying hard at the famed Sturgis biker rally in South Dakota with fellow Rotorua rider Carol Bailey.   

“That was cool: 453,000 leather-clad biker and biker chicks taking over the town.”  

Leigh-Ann joined Rotorua’s Ulysses motorcycle club in 2021. She’s now branch co-ordinator.  

On the back of that role she’s freshly home from the nationwide baton relay she conceived and organised. It was a fundraising ride for those hard hit by Cyclone Gabrielle.

 Close to $20,000 was collected by the country’s 25 Ulysses branches.     

“We have put ourselves on the map.

“Ulysses is very community focused. We’ve just taken Santa to an event in the park. We man stalls on Daffodil Day, volunteer for the local swap meets and fundraise for St John and Ronald McDonald houses.

“Ulysseans are such a cool bunch of people.”    

Biker business ventures 

Bikes also feature in her business life.

She operates a tour company named Off The Beaten Track (O.T.B.T). 

“I take biker chicks away for a weekend of fun. No WiFi, no flush toilets, it really is back to basics, usually in the worst weather pattern but this is why we ride.”

“O.T.B.T is based on supporting people, supporting local businesses. The growth of this has been huge. I had no idea.”

 Covid lockdowns spawned another venture; a Motorbiker Passport. Legh-Ann created it as a way of bringing custom back to tourism operators and businesses affected by the pandemic.

 It’s based on the principle of a coffee card and is into its second edition. Purchasing a passport puts the buyer into a prize draw.

First time around it was a Royal Enfield 650 Inceptor motor bike.

With this iteration it’s a trip to Rarotonga. “To make it more family inclusive.”   

Family, missionary kid 

Families head off bikes as Leigh-Ann’s number one priority.

She has five adult children, seven grandchildren and a great grandchild.

Which segues us into the rollercoaster ride her life was pre- Rotorua. 

Her early years were spent far far away.

From the time she was four until she was 10 she grew up on a mission station in Nigeria. The nearest school was so distant she, her older sister Sue and brother Chris boarded there.  A Cessna few them in and out.

Billy Graham ignites vision

She has the evangelist Billy Graham to thank for her non bog- standard kiwi childhood.

“We were living in South Auckland when he came and talked at the church my mother had started going to.

“My dad hadn’t really been into the church ways but when my   mother went up to the front to give herself to the Lord he went up with her.

“He’d hurt his back in a tractor accident and he said ‘Lord, if you can heal my back I will serve you forever’.

“He told us that not long after that he woke up to hear his name being called.

“The bedroom lit up and he saw the Lord standing in the doorway. Over the following days his back healed.”

Leigh-Ann’s father kept his side of the bargain. He and her mum signed on as missionaries with the Sudan International Mission (SIL).     

 “We were called MKs – missionary kids.

Sahara Desert on doorstep

“I remember living on the edge of the Sahara Desert. We saw lots of camel trains and had camel rides.

“It was not quite the kind of safari you pay money for.

“There was lots of wildlife around us, snakes, scorpions.

“I had a pet monkey called Joe-Joe. It just kind of ran around and did its monkey thing.

“Our parents had an old jeep and a wind-up gramophone.

“They’d go out into the desert to talk about the Lord and the African tribespeople would turn up out of the blue.”

Leigh-Ann has vivid memories of an electricity-free existence:  washing clothes on a scrubbing board, letters home printed on a hand-turned Gestetner machine and messages recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

“That was until the termites got into the tape box.”

Homecoming culture shock 

The family’s missionary days ended when her dad developed a heart condition and was taken to England for treatment.

“We came back to New Zealand with our mother. It was a real culture shock after six years in Africa.”

Once her father returned her parents resumed church-related work, moving around the country.

“That’s when my younger brother Robert arrived on the scene.”     

As a teenager she lived in Manurewa with her older sister who was training to be a teacher.

A very Leigh-Ann type chortle greets our inquiry about what she did after leaving school. It’s the sort that lets you know there’s a punchline coming up.

Baby Angel

 “I had my lovely baby Angel. I had just turned 17.

“I thought I’d see what sex was all about. I ended up pregnant. 

“My parents came and hauled my arse back with them to Rotorua where they were living.

“It was a bit like shutting the door after the horse had bolted.”

When Angel was three months old Leigh-Ann returned to Auckland to be with her daughter’s father.

“He was working for ICI out at Kawakawa Bay making explosives: gelignite, dynamite.”

The couple married and when Angel was three son Shannon was born.  

After 11 years the marriage ended and Leigh-Ann returned to Rotorua.

Reporoa demolition job

Here another phase of her life comes into play - selling cheese and packaged meats to retailers across the Bay of Plenty. 

She describes every day as an adventure.

No more so than the one that robbed the good folk of Reporoa of their petrol supply.   

“Here I was driving this 15-tonne truck for Mainland Cheese.

“One really wet, dark afternoon I pulled into the Reporoa 4 Square and parked close to the bowsers. The shopkeeper was a real hardcase guy. I was trying to pitch a sale to him but he didn’t buy anything.

“Back in the truck the windows were steamed up, the wipers were on, the music was cranked up.

“Driving out it was bumpy. I thought I’d gone over potholes.

“I’m thinking ‘OMG fix ya drive, dude’.

 “I could see him waving. I waved back. 

“When I got back to Rotorua he rang accusing me of running over his bowser.

“I busted out laughing and said ‘Yeah, right, say that again’.  He did and I realised that must have happened when I thought I was driving over potholes.

“I became the butt of all the Reporoa jokes and he got great pleasure from holding up the bowser cover, showing everybody what I’d driven over.

 “After that BP removed the pumps.

“My truck?  There wasn’t a mark on it.” 

She took that whoopsie as a sign it was time to return to Auckland.

Second marriage, organic chickens 

Before becoming a fully-fledged bikie chick chickens of the  dinner menu kind took over he life. 

She’d renewed her acquaintanceship with a man who, from here on in, she refers to as “the Dutchman.”

Both worked in a chicken factory.

They married and over the next 11 years had three children: Josh, Annaliese and Sarah.  Leigh-Ann calls them “The Dutch kids”.

They were living in Taupo and selling poultry processing equipment when, over a beer, “the Dutchman” floated the idea that they go into free-range organic chicken farming.    

 “We were venturing into unknown territory and virtually wrote the book on something that hadn’t been done before in New Zealand.”

They bought a former Watties factory in Gisborne and planned to convert it into a processing plant. It took two years to secure resource consent.

Complex challenges

“We were oblivious to the financial, emotional and physical challenges that lay before us.”

Leigh-Ann has laid them out in graphic detail in her recently self-published book Fowl Play. 

We won’t plagiarise it by repeating its excellent content.  

But were we reviewing it here it would come with a “Highly recommended” tagline attached.

The hard yakker that went into the chicken venture was bedevilled by pitfalls, counter balanced with high points.

One of the latter came when the business was in its seventh year.
Despite a raft of doom merchants making predictions of instant failure, go-getter Leigh-Ann succeeded in establishing a thriving export business. It was selling organic chickens to Hong Kong.

“People kept saying ‘You won’t be able to do it’. I kept saying ‘why not?’”.

This export market thrived until bird flu hit Asia.

Invercargill bombshell

The Gisborne-based arm of the business continued but failed to flourish. 

 Getting resource consents over the line became an on-going nightmare.     

With help from a financial backer the decision was made to relocate to Invercargill.

There were similar red tape issues there.

 But the nail in the organic chicken processing company’s coffin came when Leigh-Ann arrived in Invercargill.

She hadn’t unpacked when the bombshell landed.       

 She was confronted with the news her marriage was over. 

“So it was back to Gisborne and the end of the organic processing dream.

“I tend to think perhaps we were in the marketplace too early. We did the grunt work that others are benefiting from now.”

Not one to sit around licking her wounds, Leigh-Ann refocused then headed for Rotorua “with the Dutch kids and our dog Roxy in tow.”

 Fresh start 

She had a good friend here; Ross Dittmer who then owned the Meat Shoppe in Tutanekai Street. 

“He was one of my customers from my chicken days. There was always a bit of banter between us.”

They moved in together.

“Roxy was so excited to have her own personal butcher.”

Initially she worked for a food distributor then, to help a friend out, looked after holiday homes.

“I thought cleaning houses would be fun. I set up my own company and called it House Proud.

“I look after some lovely properties around Tarawera and surrounding areas, mainly Airbnbs”

After selling the Meat Shoppe Ross joined her, setting up a maintenance side to the business.

It’s work that gives her the “me time” with her bikes that she craved.  “After chicken farming 24/7.”   

 Ross is more of a mountain biker than a motor biker. But it was him she doubled the length of Route 66 and for the six weeks they spent in the States.

Indian heaven

 In Rotorua Leigh-Ann’s found her Indian heaven.

“There are some awesome roads around here. The scenery is perfect. There are lots and lots of corners.

“Gliding round them is an awesome feeling. You don’t get that in a car.

She doesn’t dispute there’s an element of danger riding on the open highway.  She’s had a couple of near misses but hasn’t canned off.

“It depends how you ride but it is nice to twist the throttle. 

“The motor purring underneath you , the wind whistling, bugs  coming at ya,  the sense of freedom."

 “You have this amazing time on your bike. You just get into the zone. I get my creative mind going.

“I like to sing under my helmet – a bit of reggae, country and western.

“I have always worked very hard. 

“This is recreation. It’s something I love doing.  The people you meet are awesome, the camaraderie is great.”

“I have the freedom to follow my own dreams, riding my beautiful Indian and helping others. Life is good.”