Sunday April 17, 2016, 11 miles (18 km) – Total so far: 202 miles (325 km)
After two weekends in a row being away for most of my four-day weekends, I had a fair amount of things to catch up on this Sat/Sun. I also wanted to hang around the house while Nigel was using the chainsaw to do some tree work. Ambulance response times here aren’t all that flash, so should he need emergency assistance, it would be quicker for me to drive him to the ER in Albury than wait for an ambulance.
While all of this didn’t allow me to put down any good miles over the two days, I did get all of the plants watered, the car washed and vacuumed, the wisteria pruned back (truly, if you want to punish future generations and whomever buys your house after you leave… plant vines…), all of the old cuttings from the roses and other bushes cleaned up, and all of the bedding washed and aired before the cold weather arrives.
I did this local loop on Saturday but made no purchase. Today, I took the camera along to get some photos and stopped at the local IGA at the end of the loop to pick up a couple sale items and a milk. Not shown in these photos are the local pub, a doctors office, the old people’s home, the preschool and a couple of small, sorta sad parks. But this collection of photos, combined with Ride 4, sums up where I live. Hopefully we will get out for a longer ride tomorrow – I feel a bit lost on the weekends I don’t do an overnight ride!
Heading out on the Bungowannah Road. It’s a tree-lined road that passes a mix of 3-8 hectare lifestyle blocks and grazing pasture that hasn’t yet been carved up for people fleeing Albury.More lifestyle blocks – these are only 1-5 hectares though. This land started being developed in 2010 when the federal government sold off this land that it had leased out for 30-some years. This land could have been where the freeway was routed. In the 1970s, the federal government bought up all the land for when they eventually duplicated the Hume Highway (the main road between Sydney and Melbourne) and made it a freeway. The old highway went right through downtown Albury and Wodonga. That was A LOT of truck traffic in town. In Albury, they bought up land for an ‘internal’ and an ‘external’ route. It went back and forth for 30 years about which route to use. When funding finally became available in the 2000s, more than 60 percent of townspeople wanted the external route. The feds wanted the external route. But state and local big business wanted the internal route because it was more convenient to them. Big business won versus the desires of the community and they rammed the freeway straight through the middle of Albury in 2007. Now, the east-west roads over the freeway suck, are not bicycle/pedestrian friendly, and were already over capacity in 2008. You can hear that darn freeway at night just about anywhere you might live in Albury and its suburbs – and the particulate pollution… well, we won’t go there, and the EPA does not publicly make available data from its monitoring sites. This is one of the reasons we moved out of Albury. The cities definitely needed a second river crossing, but did not need the freeway straight through the middle of a city of 50,000!Here we are at the intersection of the main road that runs between Albury and Jindera. Turn right and you head up and over Jindera Gap and then down into Lavington. The freeway would have gone right through here.Historical marker for one of the original settler families. There were more homestead ruins here until a couple years ago – but they’ve been cleared since then.Text from the historical marker. It notes that this property “Hawthorn” was one of the first in the area in 1866. The Scholz family was part of the German Lutheran wave of emigrants from South Australia which we’ve seen evidence of in previous rides, particularly in Walla Walla.For the roadside finds file. What is really funny is that I just signed up to be on a team at work taking part in a Mothers Day Breast Cancer Walk. I just told the organiser Friday that she should give me some lead time to find something to wear if we were going to coordinate something pink… because I don’t own anything pink! Alas, whomever this belonged to has a more ample bust than me, and this would not fit.Another new development in wait….Traditional farmers would not be caught dead raising alpacas. Sometimes they will run an alpaca with their sheep because the alpacas deter foxes, but they wouldn’t raise a herd of them. But here are some lifestyle farmers stocking a fair few South Americans.There are still some traditional farms around though… probably just waiting to sell out until property values go even higher.The new subdivision in Jindera itself. This development is so disgusting – huge houses set right on top of another on tiny 500-600 metre square blocks with tall fences that go all the way out to the nature strip. The houses behind me are so jammed on their blocks that a single car is almost longer than the driveway. I cannot see how this is attractive to people at all!
