Category: Jul-Sep 2019

Multi-month bicycle touring will change your life… in so many good ways. It teaches you resilience, mental toughness, flexibility, adaptability and how to appreciate the small things. It shows you the landscape and its people at a very human pace. It teaches you patience on the uphill and/or headwind sections; it grants you tremendous joy on the thrilling downhills. It makes you giggle with glee on those days with ridiculous tailwinds.

But multi-month bicycle touring has a few downsides.

In one way, it ruins you forever… Read more →

17 August 2019

57 kms (35 miles)

Sometimes I lose myself in a string of bicycle touring videos – usually solo cyclists taking on remote and/or difficult routes in far-flung places. Sometimes it’s places I’d like to ride myself – sometimes it’s a journey far more difficult than I would ever want to accomplish. But there are other times when inspiration comes in more domestic and day-ride sorts of ways.

There is a gentleman on the Cycle365 site who posts about his Questing rides in the English countryside. I love these write-ups because he casually cycles among Roman ruins, ancient hedgerows, verdant pastures and historic thatched roof homes. It is so different to Australia in its climate and Australia’s infant European history.

So today’s ride is one that I’m sure would be in the checkpoint book, if Questing were a thing here. Read more →

20/21 July 2019

70 kms (44 miles)

There were times when the earth warmed. This happened over thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. And then there were times the earth cooled, over thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. And it did this again and again, on timescales too huge for most to comprehend. There were five mass extinctions along the way, wiping out 70 – 96 percent of life on Earth each time.

And then man arrived. And then there was the Industrial Revolution. And then the climate began to warm at unprecedented speed – in a couple hundred years instead of thousands or tens of thousands. And so also began the 6^th mass extinction event – we are living it now.

I’ve gazed at the KT-boundary in walls of rocks – that thin line of history 66 million years ago that saw 76 percent of all life wiped out. Such a thin line. And so we tread another one now.

Anyone with any understanding of geology and the time scales involved cannot help but be alarmed by the trend lines on those climate graphs. There is nothing to believe or not believe about climate change. You either understand the science or you out yourself as scientifically illiterate.

Yet those humans and their contribution to a rapidly warming climate are helping me set my own record this weekend. Read more →