The bike went for some love upon return from the ride. The derailleur couldn’t be saved. It was $270 for a new one. The bottom bracket got a service and a brake cable got replaced. Atlas is now ready for the next adventure.
I sequestered myself in a cabin at a caravan park on Lake Hume and pounded out the journal entries for two weeks. And now I’m ready for the next little adventure – a short trip to America to see family and friends and go to a Bob Mould/Sugar concert.
So here are a few stats and reflections on our venture Into the Great Wide Open….
Some Stats
We rode for 46 days.
It rained on 20 of the 46 days, or 42% of the days. (I did not break my 2022 record of rain days on a trip – that one came out to 49%).
I sat out 11 of the 46 days to wait on rain, or wind, or both, or roads to reopen (24% of the trip).
I had 9 errand/sightseeing/rest days where I didn’t ride or didn’t ride very much.
So yes, I rode 26 days and ‘rested’ 20 days (44% of the trip). That ratio is not one that I like and part of why the trip frustrated me so much. When I go for a ride, I want to RIDE!
I had 15 days of headwind (58% of ride days); 7 days of tailwind; 4 days of variable wind.
We had only 10 of 46 days that were sunny from end to end (and I’m being generous in how I counted that). There was a lot of cloudy days on this trip, as you will have seen from all the pics.
There were only 2 mornings that I packed up a mostly dry tent after camping.
We covered about 2250 kilometres in total.
Thoughts on Gear
I was glad to have all of the warm gear I had with me: beanie, full finger gloves, fleecy sleeping pants, super lightweight hiking pants, light thermal top, mid-weight thermal top, winter puffer jacket, waterproof socks, rain coat and rain pants. I used them all and used them enough that they were all worth their bulk or weight for sure. (I guess I’ll never be a bikepacker. Also, any male that thinks that you don’t need that much stuff to stay warm needs to spend a few nights as a woman.)
My 15F REI Magma sleeping bag is bulky – it took up half a pannier. But I was never cold at night and was so glad to have it to get warm and stay warm. I never woke from being cold. It was so nice to be toasty after being out in the cold all day. I also used the mylar blanket (no weight but does take some space) around my body a couple times in my bag to get warm and under the sleeping pad a few times.
The one thing I didn’t use, mostly because of the time it would take to pack it up in the mornings and my fear of puncturing it with all of the sand, grit and mud I was always carrying around in all of my gear, was the sleeping pad. I had slept on this for a couple weeks at home before the trip and it was fine, but I much prefer the closed cell foam pad. I think it might have kept me a little warmer, but really, I was never cold at night with the good bag, so I mailed that home from Broken Hill. Maybe I’ll use it car camping?
I also sent home my little bucket and some water bladder capacity. I decided early that I would rather ride big kays with rationed water than weigh myself down and go slower. I was very happy with this decision. I would just consider the total kays I might do and then divide the litres of water into that and tell myself I could have so many millilitres per however many kays. It was generally cold enough I wasn’t thirsty much and had to tell myself to drink, so it wasn’t hard to ration. I would take this approach again in winter.
I still don’t like my lighting set-up which I used extensively on this ride. It all worked, because vehicles always gave me heaps of space, but I still didn’t like it. What I have come across which I’m going to investigate further are the lights that runners use. I bought a cheapo one for $4 from KMART that attached via magnet to my front handlebar bag. This was great – but the cheapo one would turn itself off after about three hours. However, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for – lights that attach via clip or magnet so I can clip them to the lids of my panniers. That will be so much better than the rack or my helmet. I’ll report back on this.
My stove set-up is perfect. This is as tiny and lightweight as you can get, and it is never fiddly and always reliable.
I still love my coffin. The Northface Stormbreak 2 is a budget model tent, but I love it more than any of the high-end tents I’ve owned. It is simple but robust. I now own two of them so that I have spares. My previous favourite tent was also a North Face – the North Face Tadpole back from about 2005 to 2015.
Thoughts on health
In the introduction to this journal, I talked about how I had finally found out why I have had so much trouble eating since the mozzie virus and tick bacterium infections in 2017. I was diagnosed with gastroparesis last November which I had flared up with work stress last July or so.
What I didn’t say in that introduction was that I could not drink more than 250ml of water at a time without wanting to puke when I left for the tour. I could not eat and drink at the same time. I’d shifted the gastroparesis from moderate/severe to mild, but was still dealing with a lot of symptoms. I was very, very worried that I would not be able to drink enough water or get in enough food to sustain a bike trip and I’d have to end the ride.
The best news of this trip is that all of those symptoms got better as the trip went on, even though it was a pretty stressful trip, as far as my tours have gone. I guess ride stress is not the same as work stress. My guts are always happier on tour and this was no exception.
By the end of the tour, I was able to drink 600 mls without wanting to puke. By Lake Mungo, I had an appetite again. By Pooncarie (the first time), I could eat half of a huge pub meal with no reflux or any symptoms at all.
I was pretty vigilant with taking all of my supplements and keeping up my high ginger doses though. This pill bag took up a 1/3 of one pannier and weighed about a kg when I left. But it was certainly worth it since I got better as I went.
I still have trouble eating and drinking at the same time – it just makes my stomach uncomfortably full. But that’s been the case for years now. I’ve had this issue since 2017 – it’s just nice to have a name for it after so long.
Back in 2019, when I was the sickest, I never could have imagined that I would recover this well. Will I always have to deal with the neurological fall-out from those vector-borne diseases? Yes. But the temp regulation issues, the word recall problems and the digestive issues are manageable, and I’m grateful to be back to pretty much full strength. Some people don’t survive West Nile; some people never get their Bartonella diagnosed and some people can never kick Bartonella enough to live a normal life again. I do not take my recovery for granted.
Thoughts on the route and weather
So the amount of rain and cloud was very unusual. Once we got west of Swan Hill, everywhere we passed through is considered arid or semi-arid with no more than 11 inches of rain per year. Everything north of Mildura is not winter rainfall dominant – it generally has low total annual rainfall and rain is sporadic throughout the year. This was just a very wet period for the region.
Everywhere north of Mildura had record rainfall back in March. The soil moisture level is super-high and the regular rain events in May and June meant it took longer and longer for the roads to reopen each time.
So I still think winter is the ideal time to go ride out there. I would just choose a year that had low soil moisture leading into it and climate drivers that would support a dry ride (a positive IOD and El Nino would help – SAM varies by week so is too hard to predict – it was not helpful on this trip).
I am happy to have spent the days looking at the Cadell Tilt Fault near Moama since I couldn’t do this on my 2022 tour. But the rest of the river stuff I could have done without. I think if I were to do this trip again, I would have driven out to Mildura, left the car there somewhere and done the tour from there. That’s the stuff I was most interested in and I wasted time getting out there on uninteresting roads that weren’t super safe either.
Everywhere I went, with the exception of Lake Mungo and Mutawintji, were one and done places for me. I would like to go back to those two national parks with Nigel, as he would really enjoy them. I’d also like to do more walking and geology nerding at Mutawintji.
The riding I was most looking forward to on this trip – the remote stuff north of Mutawintji – I didn’t get to do. Certainly my favourite days on the ride were the ones in and out of Mutawintji and the Top Hut Road out of Lake Mungo. Some other winter, in the middle of a drought, I wouldn’t mind going back and doing The Cut Line, Tom Roberts Road, White Cliffs Road to Mutawintji. That really remote stuff is what I like the most. I just didn’t get enough of it on this tour.
So, I’m not ready to be old and boring yet. I don’t like very many rest days. I like to keep moving. I like big km days. I don’t like riding town to town. I don’t like flat terrain. I don’t like roofed accommodation or caravan parks. I don’t like eating out more than once a week (when I do like to get a protein top-up).
This tour made me really long for the high country tours I’ve done where I load up 8 days of food and disappear into the bush and do big gravel climbs and descents and camp each night somewhere in the forest. I think I need to concentrate on rides like that while I’m still capable. And maybe some dry winter go back and do those remote roads in Far Western NSW.
Final thoughts
I am glad to have done this tour. I managed to get out to see the two national parks that I built the trip around. I endured a lot of headwinds and shit weather. I broke my distance record and surprised myself with how well my 50-year-old body recovered from that really big day.
Will I someday look back on this ride with fondness, with the bad memories fading and the good memories remaining? No, probably not. I don’t look back on the Oct-Dec 2022 ride with fondness – the miserable bits of that ride remain as vivid as the good memories. I am glad to have done that tour, as well, but is it what I call to mind when I think of my favourite rides and days on tour? No. This ride will be the same.
Somewhere along the way, I saw this meme, and I know it to be true.
If we are built to grow, to struggle, to adapt and to overcome… then this trip gave me plenty of that!
The future
My plans for September and beyond are still fluid at the moment. I still think I’m riding up to Brisbane for the Muppet exhibition and then working my way back down through NSW along the Great Dividing Range. But I need to get a better idea of what El Nino is doing and if there are any interesting work contracts around before I commit to that.
(If you comment on this journal between 1-12 August and I don’t respond right away, please know it’s because I’m doing a lot of travel from Oz to Colorado and around Colorado and I might not have access to good wifi to reply. My apologies).