Interim – Jan 2025 Ride 1 – The Wizard

16-17 January 2025

Dhudhuroa Country

The Wizard, my 2005 T800 Cannondale, turns 20 this month. I think we’ve done around 28,000 touring miles together in that time, but I’ve never counted all the day-to-day and commuter miles (or kms) so total mileage is likely to be a fair bit more than that. The Wizard has not had so much action since Atlas, my mountain bike, arrived, but I still enjoy the bike and its different ride feel compared to the mountain bike. It would be nice to give The Wizard a bit of a celebration ride this month if possible.However, it has been a miserably hot summer and I never hold out much hope that I will get much riding done in January.

Yet, a strong and destructive cold front came through on Wednesday and dropped the temps out of the mid-high 30s. A forecast high temp of 28C on Thursday and 30C on Friday has me plotting routes on my regional map. The only real weather contingency is that it is meant to be very, very windy Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The winds all have a southerly component, so any circle route is going to have a substantial headwind at some point. 

So I plot out an easy 3-day ride – it’s so easy that you could do it as an unloaded day ride if you were keen. But my shoulder is not keen, so I’ve broken the ride up into three, approximately 35km sections. I’ll keep to sealed roads mostly, which will lessen the jarring and vibrations. I THINK my shoulder might do that. The pain has lessened since I last attempted the ride out of Lightning Creek a month ago. I still have very little ROM, but the pain levels have much improved. So let’s see if the shoulder will come to the party on a simple ride from Corryong. 

16 January 2025

It’s about an hour and a half drive from Albury to Corryong if you don’t get stuck behind a truck, caravan or older driver, and I am lucky and get a very smooth run. I park the car opposite the police station and load up the bike. I have very conveniently parked next to an ant’s nest which adds a bit of high-stepping and stomping challenge to the bike loading activity.

Then we’re off. Ah, the shoulder does not hurt at all in reaching the handlebars or holding the bike weight against the gusts of wind. It’s a good sign. 

I ride past all of the older cottages on a side street and then hook up with Briggs Gap Road – one I’ve done back in 2016, I think.

The wind is strong from the southwest – a quartering tailwind or crosswind for most of our short ride today. It flaps my shirt out and pushes the short sleeves up my shoulders. It launches the bright green grasshoppers in all directions when they take flight from the long roadside grass.  They whack my cheek with a soft thud, they ping against the bike spokes and clack against my helmet. I feel them bounce off my legs before cartwheeling on toward the middle of the road through the air. It is not a good day to be an airborne grasshopper. 

One annoying strand of hair escapes from my helmet and whiplashes back and forth across my sunglasses. But I just endure that. I don’t want to stop. The wind buffets the bike and tries to push me toward the road centre, but I am strong enough to keep a straight line. My shoulder doesn’t hurt. So good.

We ride across the parched valley on a gentle downhill to Corryong Creek. Mt Mittamatite rises directly in front of us, a craggy, red granite bulb of magma that bubbled up underneath the earth’s surface in the Devonian. It was severely burnt five years ago which has left the jagged rock faces more visible than in the past. 

There is a short, sorta steep climb up out of the creek onto the mountain slopes. I spin up that slowly, wondering if I really have the leg muscles required for two gaps/saddles in 31 kms today. My heavy workout and sweating routine tanked my iron levels over the past six months, so I’ve been on very light duty (just two strength training days per week, 1 HIIT) since just before Christmas. I’m meant to be doing light exercise only for six weeks while I rebuild the iron levels (if you ever need to do this – I highly recommend beef spleen supplements – none of the awful side effects of the cheap, synthetic tablets). I’m afraid I’ve lost a lot of fitness and strength on light duties though – you lose it so quickly once you are over 40!

The flies all come to find me on that slow uphill bit where the wind is blocked a bit by trees, so it’s a relief to get back onto more open slopes with a strong crosswind to blow them away. Both homes down below the road that I pass are very new – the previous homesteads must have gone in the 2019/20 fires. They are so close to the bush on the steep slope that I’m not surprised they couldn’t be defended. I wonder if they were able to reinsure post-fire.

The road undulates along all the way to the gap. There is not much traffic. There are long views to the south up the Nariel Valley. I’ve ridden a whole lot of the roads and tracks up in those mountains at the head of the valley and I try to think back to how many times I’ve ridden down or up that valley to the mountains beyond. 

The road curves around an isolated hill at the gap, and then we get a nice, roaring downhill with just enough curves and detritus in the road to keep you on your toes. The wind gusts also add an element of challenge and I love that adrenalin hit as my brain thinks fast and tells my body just how to balance, when to brake (it doesn’t indicate we need to), and how hard to grip the bars to hold onto that bike weight in the wind. Oh, how I’ve missed using these skills!!! I don’t think I need to do another boring hike or walk for at least a year!

We land in the Cudgewa valley, a long narrow valley bounded by the ignimbrites of Burrowa-Pine Mountain National Park on the left and the granites of Mt Mittamatite on the right. The road is mostly flat as we follow the creek downstream on an old faultline that separates the extruded volcanics of the collapsed caldera to the left and the intrusive granites to the right. The wind gives me a bit of a push through here – enjoy it, as it’s the only tailwind we’ll have for the duration of the trip. 

This road was the main fallback line in the 2019/20 fires. They tried to hold the fire along this road but were overrun. Conditions on the night were pretty horrific – just 20 kays away on the NSW side of the river, a fire tornado was large enough to fully lift and overturn a fire truck, killing the young firefighter inside. They lost 14 homes in this valley, and in the Cudgewa North area that will we ride through a bit later. But they saved quite a few homes, as well as the pub, Memorial Hall and other ‘town’ buildings. The fire would move on to threaten the town of Corryong (and burn out its landfill). The fire then headed on into forest south of Corryong and kept going. 

I turn off this road and drop down to the creek. The stink of damp silage and dairy cows is blasted toward me with the wind. It brings a million flies with it. The flies are always so terrible near dairy farms. We need to climb over another saddle to get out of this drainage and into the next, so I’m hoping the wind will blow those buggers away as we get out of the low and bushy creek.

Alas, it is not to be. The wind does blast us, but the flies are persistent. I should have pulled out my head net. The little bastards are all over my face, head, arms and legs as I slowly crawl up the hill. Ugh. My legs have felt very flat today and I don’t feel like I’ve got lots of force to put into the pedals. So I’m stuck crawling up the hill in slow motion, spinning away somewhere in my easy chainring. The good news is that my arm does not hurt at all – even with all the extra muscle required to keep the bike balanced in the hefty wind. That is good stuff. I’ll take all these flies if it means my arm will allow us to ride again.

It’s a good compromise, but I do manage to swallow two of the buggers on that uphill. One is a sacrifice. It was about to fly up my nose, so I exhaled forcefully from my nose which meant I then inhaled abruptly through my mouth. But I would much rather have a fly down my throat than up my nose. If you’ve ever had that happen you will know the terrible, burning pain and how impossible it is to blow it out or snuff it up to a place that is not extraordinarily unpleasant. 

I stop for a drink of water where there is a nice view back to where we’ve come from and all the very burnt ridges in the park. I count 22 flies on my right rear pannier alone. There are at least 12 on my right leg, 11 on my handlebar bag and one on Verne’s back. I don’t know how many are around my head or on the windward side of the bike. 

There’s another crest around the hill, and then a nice, bombing dive to Stony Creek. We then follow this upstream, first on seal, then on gravel. There is one government-provided shipping container living pod placed in front of an old cottage missing part of its roof, next to the foundation of a newer house that obviously burnt down. The next door neighbour’s house was saved. I feel sad for the old bloke I see get out of a ute next to the pod. It’s five years on. If he hasn’t rebuilt a house by now, that tiny pod is likely the ‘home’ that he’ll die in. I wonder if the government just writes those off as a loss, or you have the option to purchase your pod if you don’t have the funds to rebuild a house.

There are other very new homes scattered up the valley – this area would have been very hard to defend with bush on both sides. Some of the new homes are considerably nicer than the old ones they replaced (if my memory of the old ones is correct). 

We pass the turn off to the falls. It’s six kays up to the waterfall, and there are two small camping areas along the way. There is not likely to be much water flowing, though, so I don’t bother.

I continue up the valley on good gravel that is just a tease. The gravel gets bigger and looser as we go. Ugh. By the time we reach our turn off and the steeper incline, the gravel is big enough and loose enough to really impede progress. That is tough going – particularly when I know how easy it would be on the mountain bike. You’d just ride over it, you’d not have to so tediously try to pick a line rock by rock..

I turn off for Hinces Creek. They’ve regraveled and widened this track after the fires. They also cut down a bunch of the big, old trees that lined the road and hid the home that sits below (it is much nicer and bigger than the one it replaced – I guess it’s good a few people get good payouts as that doesn’t seem the norm). 

We get to the campsite and there is temporary fencing blocking it off. Damn. I did look on the Parks VIC website to see if the park had any closures, but there is no information listed about the park at all. There is no one there working, and there is no obvious work being done, so I figure I’ll just carry the bike around the gate later.

First, we head down to the creek. It looks pretty rough and doesn’t have too much flow. 95 percent of this national park burnt, and 70 percent of the park experienced a full canopy burn in the 2019/20 fires. The park had not had a big fire since 1952. 

Five years later, it still looks very, very singed. So many of the big trees are gone, and what ones remain have empty top branches reaching out in burnt crooks above the epicormic regrowth. It is very scrubby and bushy down below in the midstorey and the lack of big trees has opened up views right up the drainage and over to the cliffed ridges across the valley. It is definitely a huge change from what it once was. 

While devastating, it is the future that is more grim. Fire is an integral part of this landscape. 70 percent canopy burn is not much of a mosaic burn, however, and it is scary to think of how much more quickly and intensely fires burn these days. Yes, the bush will mostly recover from this fire IF, and that is a very big IF, it doesn’t get another fire for another 50 or more years. With climate change, that seems very unlikely. I really do fear we have already passed the tipping point for many ecosystems, even if we somehow kept temps to the IPCC 1.5C. 

I sit down in the shade on a flat rock and watch the guys float. It’s only around 11am, and we are finished for the day. My arm does not hurt. It has had a tough job holding onto the bike in the 30kph winds and loose gravel roads, so I’m feeling really happy about that. I eat some salmon and salad on multigrain corn thins and have a couple squares of chocolate. I just relax and listen to all the white noise – the wind in the trees and the creek flowing over the rocks. The guys blow back and forth on their tether – you wouldn’t find a happier frog or turtle. 

Once the shade has completely disappeared, we go back up to the little camping area, slip past the temp fencing with the bike and spend the afternoon following the shade around. The fire burnt the toilet and one of the two picnic tables, but I’m happy just hanging out in the patches of shade. It is the most perfect day you could ask for in January – wind to keep the flies away and the temp down, no bad weather, no people, no worries at all. 

I spend the afternoon doing breathwork while thinking about the fires here, the fires in LA and what the future holds.

Now I don’t want to bore you with ancient stories like the oldies tend to do, but I need to provide a bit of context for my thinking about all the ramifications of fire, as these events are relevant to much of the work I’ve done in my ‘career’.

Back in 1999, I spent 10 weeks in LA with my Americorps National Civilian Community Corps team working with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. For 5 weeks we built a new trail in the Los Virgenes open space near Calabasas and stayed in a big hall in Topanga Canyon. For the other five weeks we stayed at the old Chautauqua camp in Temescal Canyon in Pacific Palisades while we did environmental work throughout LA on Conservancy properties. We would regularly make the 5-minute walk down to the Palisades village after work to get snacks. We hiked the trails in the park, including along the ridge where the recent fire started. I walked all over what they called the ‘ABC streets’ and down to the beach on days off. I celebrated my 23rd birthday there with beer from Ralph’s (burnt down now). 

So I know Pacific Palisades very well from my time there. I also know a lot about wildfire since I did my PhD on that topic. I also know a lot about emergency management, particularly since my last contract and upcoming contract are both focused on natural disaster risk reduction at local and regional government level. 

So I am transfixed by what unfolds in LA and I watch a lot of video feed, read a lot of articles and ponder the psychosocial and emergency mgmt aspects of it all. I am deeply saddened by the loss of all those places my team worked/explored in Topanga and Pacific Palisades. But I am heartened to hear that somehow, through retardant, hardening, brush clearing and onsite staff, they saved the old camp we stayed at tucked up in the canyon. The camp is quite historically significant as the Methodist folks that started that in 1922 also laid out the Pacific Palisades neighbourhoods and sold off the property to start the town.

So I spend the afternoon thinking about evacuation messaging, fire resistant building materials, and what you do to prepare, defend, or just get out of the way of fires in catastrophic conditions. This is our future, worldwide, and at some point, images like those coming out of LA will become the norm, if it is not the norm already. It will become just another news story, like gun massacres in the US now. 

It makes me even more determined to get out there and go do these really tough mountain rides now, before I get too old and weak, and before the conditions become too untenable. This year’s work project will conduct critical infrastructure risk assessments using a criticality framework for each of my org’s member councils. We’ll also do maturity assessments of each council’s strategic land use planning documents to see how well they use an all-hazards, risk-based approach to development. And then, I will be done, and will be off on the bike trying to beat climate change to the formation of some really good memories. Someday that’s all we’re going to have.  

The wind roars through the trees all night long. I sleep pretty well. At home I use a pillow in my armpit to keep my shoulder in a position it is happy with for long periods. Without the pillow my arm isn’t quite so happy, but I’m still pleased with how little pain I have after the muscle and usage required to fight through those 30kph winds. 

17 January 2025

The obnoxious birds are not around. It is nice to wake up without the sound of screeching parrots. I make up a protein shake, then go filter a litre of water from the creek and drink that. I think the reason I felt so flat yesterday might have been not starting out hydrated well enough. Even though the temps were only around 30C, the wind made it feel less warm, and so I don’t think I drank enough for the temperature.

We immediately have a 200 metre climb over four kms on gravel. The gravel is in good shape though, so I just spin upwards in the early morning sunlight and appreciate the flatter breaks in the climb. They say that of the 17 critically endangered species in the park, they’ve found that all but two survived the fires and are recovering. In studies in 2022, they also found 3 new species. So we wiped out two species, but found an additional three, and so now have 18 critically endangered species in the park (read: a lot of plants we are slowly extinguishing). How many species did we not know about that got wiped out – lost to one of earth’s five extinction events before we ever knew of their existence?

Two species that are doing mighty fine post-fire are the grey kangaroos and wallabies. I lose count of how many go crashing into the bush, dart across the road, or leap from the high side embankment down onto the road and away. You’d hate to have to commute on this road. 

The gravel is mostly good and we crawl on up, riding an easy gear. The wind switches directions but is mostly caught by the trees. It is too early for flies. So I really enjoy that climb. My legs are not sore from yesterday and they will feel stronger all day. 

My butt doesn’t hurt either. I thought it might since I haven’t done long rides lately. I know I’m not riding long enough or often enough if my butt hurts when I ride. I used to think that my butt would hurt when I was too fat, but then I lost all that weight with the gallbladder and was underweight. Yet my butt still hurt if I didn’t ride often or long enough. So I conclude that it has nothing to do with weight. It is all to do with muscle. I now have pretty good glute muscles and, even though I have limited saddle time this season, my butt goes just fine. Just another benefit of strength training!

We crest the saddle and start into the long downhill to Walwa. Some of this gravel is not so good, but I still love the downhills and all the thinking you have to do to get the best line. I miss the mountain bike on these runs, though, because I could really let it run and just go for the ride instead of having to be so careful about hitting rocks. Additionally, unlike my mountain bike disc brakes, with the rim brakes, I cannot stop, I can only slow down on a steep downhill. Holding those brifters and squeezing the brakes for many kms on levers that are too big for my hands means my hands cramp up into claws. But oh, I love it.

I also appreciate the wider, knobbier tyres of the mountain bike. I’ve really got to be careful with the line on the touring bike and have to keep the speeds a bit lower. I can’t launch into the air off of rocks confidently, and it definitely feels a heck of a lot more squirrely when I get a little rock at speed that lifts the front or rear wheel. Nothing like feeling a wee bit out of control and riding loose on slippery gravel. Oh, but I love it. 

Down, down, down we go. Eventually we pop out into private land that is a mix of forest and pasture. The road straightens out and there are long sight lines, so you can really let it run through here. I need to do this on the mountain bike! There are rough patches with vibrations that ricochet through the bike frame, shaking me and the bike like riding over a cattle grid. But oh, it is so fun to go fast. Oh, how I’ve missed it.

One wallaby comes hopping up to the roadside and makes a decision good for both of us when he turns around and heads back in the other direction. The wind is still hefty and variable, pushing us this way and that as we float over and down that long stretch of gravel. 

I finally come up to an oncoming car, but the grade has lessened enough that I can stop. Conveniently, there is an area I can get over to let the guy pass, as this road is only 1.5 car widths at most. He’s towing a trailer with a mower and lifts two fingers off the steering wheel in acknowledgement. 

Walwa is quiet. We hit town right on 8.15am. I deposit my rubbish and then go over to the public toilets to refill water and sit down for some morning tea. I’m really working on trying to get the protein in, and to take breaks every 1.5 hours. Your gut microbiome hates steady state cardio. The good microbes start to degrade after a couple of hours of this sort of exercise. You also tend to have burned through all of your glycogen stores in 1.5 hours, and so your body starts going for your muscle at this point, too. (Keto and fat-burning is not a good long term strategy for fueling, gut health or cardiovascular risk, so none of that for me!). I really felt that muscle loss by the end of the six-month tour in 2022-23, so I need to get better at this before the next long tour.

So I sit there and have another protein shake (pea protein powder and water) and have some salmon on the multigrain corn thins. It is a challenge with that wind wanting to whip everything out of my hands!  I take the half hour requisite break and then we head off toward Tintaldra. 

I’ve always loved riding the Murray River Road. They’ve poured money into fixing up the lookouts and promoting it as The Great River Road – I wish they wouldn’t, it’s always been such a nice and quiet road with good views and not much traffic. But there’s not too many people out today.

The hefty wind is a crosswind at times and a quartering headwind at times. We fight into it all and my shoulder doesn’t really complain. Really, the thing that hurts the most is my upper traps and neck. No other activity outside of cycling keeps your neck crooked back in the bike position, so my neck muscles are pretty sore. But on we go.

We ride on as the road undulates along the ends of spurs above the Murray River floodplain. I think about Mel Gibson’s comment after he lost his mansion in the LA fires. He said, “I’ve been relieved of the burden of my things.”  

I love that quote. I have bike gear, 4 plastic tubs of clothes and 4 plastic tubs of sentimental things. The rest of my crap is just stuff you need for domestic life. But still, I fret about those 4 tubs of special things and how they tie me to a place. I cherish those few things, but life would be so much easier if I could let those things go. 

When I was speaking with my Dad about Mel Gibson’s quote, he said losing your property to fire  would be a lot like the Kris Kristofferson song that goes, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”.  

That so much illuminates our different takes on life. That quote devalues freedom – it’s like a consolation prize. The way I see life, freedom is one of my highest values, you don’t lose anything to get it. You make conscious choices to enable it. Of course, my parents are into things, and their house is stuffed full of things. When they retired, they upsized and bought a bigger house, and it is completely full of stuff. In contrast, all of my furniture can fit in my car except the washer and fridge. I’ve just never been a stuff person, and those 4 tubs of sentimental things cause me some existential grief!

We roll into Tintaldra – ready for a break from the wind. Tintaldra is a few homes, an old caravan park, a pub, a Memorial Hall with public toilets, and a post office/general store that used to do morning/Devonshire teas (it might still do so, but the lady that did all that has died, so I’m not sure). It’s for sale if you are looking to relocate and do not value freedom.

My thought was that I would stay here at the caravan park if it looked pretty empty. We’ve done another 30kms or so. The wind is very tiring. All day today it is 30kph sustained with gusts to 46kph. If we go further, the cross and quartering headwinds are going to become a straight headwind as we round the mountains back toward Corryong. So the plan was to stay here and give my shoulder only around 30 kms a day of riding.

However, there are a bunch of 2-person tents taking up all the shady areas at the caravan park (probably a church or special interest group up here canoeing the river). The pub doesn’t open for another hour, the general store is closed, the public toilet block and only water source is closed, and it is just 11am. My shoulder does not hurt. 

So let’s go all the way back to Corryong today. 

It’s going to be tough into that wind, but there are lookouts and picnic tables spaced out along the way where we could take breaks. The wind is not forecast to increase or decrease this afternoon, so we can take all the time we want. 

The worst thing is that I only have about 1.25 litres of water left. I would have filled up more in Walwa had I known I couldn’t refill here. There are no more options along the way. But let’s go. It will be 67 kms in total today, but my shoulder is good for it. I think my legs are – we’ll just have to see!

So I go down to the river, eat more protein sitting on the slab where there was once a picnic table, and then roll out of town. Whew! That wind is battering us with almighty force!  It makes me think of a cold, cloudy day in Illinois on my 2010 tour where I pedaled so hard for 6 hours to only go 30 miles. It is definitely not cold or cloudy today, but the hefty wind makes the 29 degrees feel more like 25, and it keeps the flies away. Those are super bonuses in January in Oz!

The road eventually angles us right into the wind and I’m in very easy gears even on the slight downhills. I’ve been battered enough and need to reapply sunscreen about 7 kms down the road, so we pull into Farron’s Lookout and sit on the shady, covered picnic table for a while gazing at the Main Range. 

We then fight on into the wind on the downhill and then crawl across the river flats for the 4kms into Towong. Oh my goodness, is that a crawl. My shirt is blowing all over the place, ruffled by that headwind. But my legs are okay. My shoulder is pretty much fine. Good stuff. The wind is a bit brutal, but my goodnes, I am so grateful to be out here!

There is really nothing to Towong. Down the hill, there is a public camping area on the river. There is a huge racecourse here, but no open amenities. There are some houses along the highway and up on the hill. And that is it. 

Thankfully, there is a row of really tall pine trees between the highway and frontage road. They provide a bunch of shade and a soft bed of needles. So I pull out my ground sheet and lay down on that for a bit. I take off my helmet. I learned long ago that should you ever lay down near a road for a break you should take off your helmet and lean your bike against something so people won’t think you’ve crashed.

I lay there and watch a helicopter hovering over the racecourse for awhile. It takes back off, circles around and dips down again. Maybe it’s practicing landings in windy conditions?  The contract postie comes to fill the row of PO boxes. He looks over at me a couple times. I think he concludes I’m okay, then goes about his business. I eat another salmon packet. We’ve covered 11 kms from Tintaldra; we’ve got 12 more to go to get back to the car.

On we go – back into the crazy wind. We pick up more traffic here, so the riding is a bit more tense, particularly because the wind is swapping from SSW to S every few gusts. The road angle changes a bit, too. So I’m being smacked by the wind head-on, then shoved from the front quarter at random. That’s a tough go. There’s no road shoulder to weave/ hide in.

I ride by one section of long grass that is absolutely chockers with grasshoppers. They all leap up and toward me with the wind. It’s like an army assault. All I can see is grasshoppers in front of me. They land on my helmet, in my helmet holes, against my cheek, on my legs, against my legs, in the crooks of my arms. Just as many go flying through the frame and spokes and out the other side. I have never been deluged by so many all in one go. It’s a grasshopper tornado! 

Most get flung away with the wind before they can crawl around on me too much, but one rides in a helmet hole all the way to my next rest stop 5 kms up the road, and one crawls around on my leeward shoe and sock for about a km. 

I see two touring cyclists heading my way far in the distance. They should have a quartering tailwind/ tailwind, but really anything but a straight tailwind is really hard to work with when the wind is this nuts. I get to them on a bit of a downhill for me, so I just wave. They are on mtn bikes but with panniers instead of a bikepacking set up. It’s a couple that are probably around my age. They aren’t wearing bright colours, they aren’t riding single file, and they don’t appear to have mirrors. Shame on them! They appeared oblivious to the cars approaching from behind them. That’s what gives us all a bad name!

I turn the pedals over and get excited to see a sign showing a picnic table with a tree. Yes, another 5 kms, another break from the wind. I ride down to the covered picnic tables, remove my helmet and the grasshopper, and then lay down on the table for 10 minutes. Only 5 more kms to go after this.

The picnic table shelter jiggles in the wind. It’s a bit disconcerting. If the whole thing vibrated a bit more, I might have stayed there longer for a back massage.

Onward. One headwind gust is so strong it literally stops me for a second. Then a crosswind gust immediately shoves me hard toward the inside of the lane. Luckily, the car coming from behind gives me a very wide berth and a friendly honk. Verne’s hat is flipped back like an umbrella that’s been blown inside out. He looks so silly from behind (when I recreate it in the evening and see him from the front, I can’t stop laughing). 

Finally, we drag ourselves into Corryong. It is, of course, up a slight hill when coming from the east. It is right on 2pm. We’ve done 67 kms in those super windy conditions. I would call that a decent distance even in the middle of a tour for a day with that strong of a constant wind and so many gusts. So I’m really happy with the day since I’ve had no major rides behind me for a long time. 

I stop at the takeaway shop at the top of the hill, because I’m not riding back up here if the one at the bottom of the hill on the other end of town is closed. Because it’s 2pm, I’ve just missed any cafe options. So I get a hamburger with 2 extra slices of beetroot (which I use as a bun). I sit inside, so happy to be out of that frickin’ wind! 

Phew! Those gusts were so random and brutal. 

Then I head down to the supermarket and get fixings for a salad for dinner later. I don’t feel like driving home tonight, so I head out to Colac Colac to stay at the caravan park there after packing the bike away in the car. It has always looked so attractive from the road as it has tons of deep shade from a whole bunch of deciduous trees. 

The only problem is that not many of the unpowered sites have the deep shade and it is very expensive at $40 for some grass and a shower. The lady tries to give me a site with some shade but it doesn’t have any. I make do and straddle a couple sites to get the shade off of a poplar tree. Luckily, the wind means it’s not too hot.  For all the times I’ve ridden or driven by over the last 22 years, it’s such a disappointment.

And then I just pull out a blanket from my car boot, spread it on the ground, and lie flat on my back for a very long time. My traps, neck and lower back are pretty done from tensing up with the traffic and hunching into the wind, so it feels good to just lay on the soft grass. Out here on the edge of the paddock in the far flung reaches of the unpowered sites, the wind continues unabated. I lie there, as low as you can go to get out of it, and watch the poplars sway back and forth in the wind. 

I get up to pee, take a shower, eat the salad, and send check-in texts, but mostly, I just lay there on the grass for three hours. But the great news is that my shoulder is a little sore and cranky but really not bad at all. It’s no more cranky than my neck. We’re back in business, even before the cortisone shot!

Oh, that wind continues all night long, flapping the tent and flexing the poles. I do set the tent behind the car as a windbreak, which helps, but it is still a noisy night in there. I sleep  pretty well. 

Happy Birthday, The Wizard, what a ride to celebrate – short but intense!