Today started out as a team time trial - team Trek made up of myself and Hef and team S (evil word) made up of Helga, Jann and Smirinoff - not their real names but they spoke broken English and we could hardly understand them. Anyway, anyone who was riding a bike today had the same idea - be on the road early to beat the headwind. Right, back to the time trial. It was all over about 2k out of town, team S had the pedal down as they had to be in Hobart by 11 for a brewery tour!
As we plodded along we had a few bergs to roll over including Break-me-Neck and Bust-me-Gal which by now didn't phase us to much, but the downhill run off Bust-me-Gal was more of a ride out of a theme park with squally winds and panniers laden with GB trees!
5k out of Richmond all teamwork went out the window and Kittstar made a solo break up the final climb, hoping for a cruisey run downhill to the finish - but the headwind put a stop to that and I had to pedal flat out down the hill just to hit 35k/hr. But for the record I still held Hef off for the win!
Our K tally to date now sits at an odd 444k with one day of riding left... Here's to a break in the weather tomorrow.
Today I'm excited - we're on our way to Richmond! I'm not so excited about the lumps that lay between here and there, but as Zulu said yesterday "welcome to touring!".
Hef is keen to get on the road and beat the winds that are expected again today so I must run..... Or perhaps ride....
Well today we cracked the Hundy (103k in 5hrs 10min, destination Orford) thanx to a couple of extra k's down a road just past Swansea to Kate's Berry Farm. And I can tell you that those couple of extra k's were well worth it! This is definitely a must do, must eat stop if you're ever in the east coast region. Hef can highly recommend the Blueberry Pie!
The Zulu finally read his weather beads right and the raging headwind he had promised arrived with force today about 30k into our journey. It was like this for the entire day, including the final 30k into Tarabunna along a section we named "The Malborough Straight of Tasmania". We became that desperate that we pulled up stumps in the middle of nowhere to munch on our fresh cherries and bananas just to get some reprieve from the belting we were taking!
On a good note though we again saw some awesome sights - definitely an advantage of staying at B&B's and travelling by bike. Attraction 1: the spike bridge, built in the early 1800's by convicts - Looks very cool. Attraction 2: The Lair, just past Kabuki tea house, this holiday house will set you back $1,800 a night (personally I think you'd get better value haggling Hef for an FX 7.6!). And finally Attraction 3: the shoe fence. In the middle of the Malborough Straight other delirious travellers have started throwing their shoes out the window to make this random drive by feature!
I can honestly say that all four days so far have been different and challenging in every way, but I've never enjoyed such an adventure in all my life and we're kind of hooked on the bike touring thing!
