Brisbane to Canberra
A beautiful few days with my awesome mate Pen in Brissy including a well-learned lesson in cooking a good steak, I also had time to unpack my brain and toodled up the coast a bit finding the amazing Glass House Mountains which, as beautiful as the photos turned out, do no justice to the gorgeous beauty of the area.
The amazing Glass House Mountains
I parked the bike and walked a couple of km up a mountain and loved the place, as well as the beautiful Mooloolaba beach.
View from a small mountain walk nearby
With my tappets tapping, I rode on from Brisbane saying goodbye to Pen - down the coast zipping inland and stopping off at the wonderfully friendly town of Tenterfield and discovered a delicious Deepwater Dark Ale beer in an empty pub staying overnight in a cabin. Zipped further inland about 200km the next day to find the quieter and more interesting towns, going all the way towards Inverell then down through a lovely practically empty road to Uralla. At one stage, I took a wrong turn - finding a small but beautiful road through a tiny dispersed community that was such a joy I had to eventually reluctantly turn back since it was taking me in the wrong direction.
A beautiful wrong-turn single-land country road
Stopped off at Walcha and camped in the swag for the night, where heavy weights on my shoulders in this journey saw fit to shift down to my chest and I awoke at 5am in the morning to a beautiful sunrise that touched me to my core suddenly able to see with a clarity of accepting my sole presence to be there.
Camping in Walcha
A ride through the mountains back to the coast saw me riding through massive bushfire areas, choosing by luck a path which hadn't been closed due to bushfire between the two which had. The smell and sight of smoke was strong on the road and I can't imagine what it would be like to ride through an area actively threatened.
Beautiful ride through a mountain road
Riding through the mountains, I was lucky enough to choose the only one of the three routes that wasn't closed due to bushfires. All this (apart from the cloud upper-right) is smoke from bushfires and the ride from this point on was smokey.
From there, a strong ride into Sydney through the beautiful Old Pacific Highway which I had ridden out on weeks ago and the battle through Sydney suburbia which is slow and laboursome compared to the beautiful country riding, arriving at my office and parking the bike to train out to my great mate Justin's place and hang out. Three days of my bike in a carpark led to the battery giving up it's meager charge and I spent hours dealing with that before heading out for Canberra/Queanbeyan five hours behind schedule - discarding the beautiful back-road plan I had for a 3-hour motorway blast trying to minimise the amount of dusk-time in which kangaroos might choose for a rapid closer look at my bike.. all went well. Riding into Queanbeyan I was touched by the hometown I had only briefly spent two days in over the last 31 days.. and was struck that my overwhelming feeling was that the role of Queanbeyan was complete in my heart and while it hadn't provided the Canberra work I had intended for my business, it had served me well and with a wisdom in many other ways that I had never anticipated when moving here 14 months ago. For now though, a trip to Wagga awaits to see my life-long friend Justin from Perth who is visiting there, followed by Sydney, some local country rides to see everything I'd like to see and a new ride to Melbourne and Adelaide. The road wants to own me for a while and I see no reason to argue.