Canberra to Newcastle to Sydney
I've learned SO MUCH on these travels, and I continue to learn. A big part of embarking on these travels and living on the road has been to grow, to make myself uncomfortable, to face things and to shift to become a greater person. I've learned a lot of great things, a lot of happy things and a lot of sad things too. I've had to sacrifice due to sad things I've learned. I've found deep truths. I've found a beautiful smile on my face grow outside of my control at times as I ride, and outside of my riding as well. I love this, it is a huge part of who I am.
I rode out from Canberra to a town called Crookwell, which turned out to be a bit of a funny place. The hotel owners were all drunk, I helped make the bed, one of the owners knocked over a huge plant as they drove off. But the bed was warm and luxuriously comfortable on a night that was below freezing and I slept wonderfully well.
In the morning, I awoke to this wise galah..
..and my beautiful faithful bike with ice on it and, like me some mornings, unwilling to start up for the day.
Being a zero-degree morning, a modern bike would automatically adjust the fuel injection and it would start fine - but my bike is 17 years old with 52,000km on the clock and a very traditional V-twin design, air-cooled and.. most relevant to this situation.. with a carburetor and a manual choke.
I know the score.. so I rolled the bike to a flat surface, increased the choke to three-quarters and adjusted the petcock to gravity-flow fuel into the carby and this worked a treat, though it would stall as soon as I let the throttle go, even with the choke out, for about the first 10 minutes. Not a problem on the open road, but something I had to be very mindful about navigating roundabouts and corners and such.
So while my mechanical-sympathy was in mind as I rode, the bike was still wonderfully happy and I had a terrific ride to my next stop in Bathurst.
As a child from 5 to 15 years of age in the late 70s to the late 80s, I used to love watching the Australian Touring Car Championship and Bathurst, so it was a childhood dream of mine to visit Mount Panorama and ride it myself.
For those who don't know, this most famous of Australian race tracks functions as a suburban road most days of the year - traffic travels in both directions on the track and there is a 60kph speed limit, with driveways into people's houses and businesses on the track.
Tempting as it was to ride fast, I kept to the speed limit - partially in case of speed cameras and partially out of respect to the residents living on the track. Those straights are mighty long at 60kph.. but the corners are surprisingly tight and there were a couple I couldn't do at 60kph.. incredibly impressive of the race drivers to throw themselves down the brutal corners going down to the main straight - and was fun to ride them at 60kph.. I don't know I could have ridden them much faster anyway..!
Stayed at a terrific cheap hotel near the track and rode on it again the next morning where the very cold weather left fog hovering over the city of Bathurst.
Big ride today - rode up into the hills on beautiful wide curving roads, then turned left onto Putty Road - a fast 160km road weaving between two forests, famous for motorcyclists in the area. These roads are fast - there are good straights that lead into long flowing corners that you don't need to slow down for. I found myself in a feeling of 'flow' and while I was making the suspension on my bike work on the not-ideal road surfaces, it was an incredible beautiful ride.
About half-way in, I found what must be one of the most isolated public telephones in the middle of the forest..
(Middle-right of the photo, you can see the public phone)
And about two-thirds of the way into this forest, I found a cafe full of motorcycle riders and grey nomads.
My bike is all the way to the right of the photo. There was some beautiful bikes here, a real variety including the obligatory GSs, a Harley Iron, an old Triumph and many more. I had a meal and a coffee here, then chatted with some old hands who were admiring the traditional lines of my bike and who were impressed at the long distances I've been riding. My bike has long legs and handles the distance like a star, but I know my next bike - a first generation Triumph Speedmaster (air-cooled 790, side-cut pipes and yellow-bee highlighted tank) will really soak up the miles with about three times the horsepower of my Suzi Intruder. Until then though, I am loving the Suzi who has been kind and a faithful stewarding companion to me through a great deal over the last 9 months. I could not have asked for a better bike.
From here, I rode the rest of the forest (after being warned by the woman in the cafe that the roads become tighter so to take it easy because she's seen bad accidents out that way) and into Newcastle where I worked and stayed for the night.
Then a ride out to Singleton to see some of the beautiful local roads - some fast and wide, some only one-car wide with blind corners - but all beautiful, then riding down to Sydney via the Old Pacific Highway which I wrote about in one of my first blog entries. I was blessed to have barely any traffic on the Old Pacific Highway and I really enjoyed this run.
Sydney was wonderful on this visit and my heart is singing.
After finishing work here, I'll be riding down the coast to Wollongong then Ulludulla then tracking inland to Canberra.
Reached 53,600km on this trip which means I've traveled 20,000km since I purchased the bike about 8 months ago.
Happy bike, happy man. Thanks for reading!
