Brisbane to Canberra - part 1

20170817_165408

20170817_161854

20170818_112317

20170819_095754

20170819_095115

20170819_095820

20170819_101421

20170820_102732

20170820_133328

20170820_140505

20170821_143555

20170821_151525

I’m writing this blog in a caravan on a farm near a town called Broke in New South Wales near the top of Yengo National Park. This farm is a vast range of beautiful discovery and I’m spending a few days here recording my first series of Excel Macro training videos to be released in a few weeks.

I’ll be writing about that in part 2 a few days from now, but first I have plenty to write about riding from Brisbane.

After my beautiful friend Penny saw me off from Brisbane, I rode inland for a bit then back out to the coast seeing a friend and having a terrific meal. Rode out to Mount Warning where I spent some relaxing time reading.

I had been lucky enough to find some fantastic accommodation at an astonishing cheap price.. only $58 a night..

..where I hung out with some hilarious welcoming locals and shared a meal with a good friend. Also found there were kayaks for hire.

Turns out I’m not a fan of kayaking. Now I know.. heheh!

In any case, I took the beautiful curvy mountainous Kyogle Road which is perfectly fun to ride with wonderful views but has too many potholes on the approach into Kyogle, then zipped down to Casino and across to Tenterfield with the tune of “Tenterfield dancer” playing in my head as everyone would mention it as where Peter Allen was born. But that’s not why I was travelling there.

I was going for the Deepwater Imperial Stout brewed by Hillbilly Brewing which I haven’t been able to find anywhere else – my second-favourite beer after the amazing Founders Scotch Ale I discovered on a trip to Katoomba a few weeks ago. Enjoyed two (expensive!) (delicious!) glasses and a small pizza before an early night for the big ride ahead the next day.

Not long into the day’s ride I stopped off at an old bridge for the trains that used to run through New South Wales.

A beautiful part of history lost to the higher efficiency and flexibility of truck driving. I’d love to write about how the country train network was closed down in stages over the 70s and 80s and how much of the items from the stations (like signs, benches, etc) were sold off in auctions and now reside in people’s homes across the state, but I already have a rant about solar eclipses to come.

Clive Robertson who I enjoyed listening to on late-night radio in Sydney nearly a decade ago brought my understanding of this period of NSW rail history to the fore.

So it was on to Glen Innes, then turn left onto the Gwydir Highway across the Great Dividing Range and into Grafton ready to ride the other arm of the Waterfall Way I had missed on the way up. As it turned out, the arm I had missed wasn’t the best part anyway. Grafton to Hergani is a bag of fruit loops. Some roads are well maintained and you can really trust into the corners but not this one – having so many potholes, uneven surfaces and suddenly-changing road surfaces that you had to carefully approach each corner for fear of not knowing what conditions were coming up next. Someone had even gone to the trouble to spray-paint in big red letters DANGER! for an upcoming corner. It reminded me of the state of country roads in the 1980s when I was a kid and the signage reflected that, it was like a time warp.

Eventually a stop-off down a small farm road to defrost my fingers..

..and then riding into the viewing area of Ebor waterfall..

Wow. This double-waterfall is stunning and so graceful. I rode on into the small town of Wollomombi and had a coffee at the friendly general store before riding on and turning down a gravel road for a kilometre to see another waterfall. I had figured that since this one was gravel while Ebor had a bitumen road, it wouldn’t be as good as Ebor. Boy was I wrong..

This was a spot that makes you repeatedly whisper to yourself “wow...” even though there’s nobody around to hear it. It’s impossible to even remotely capture on camera, the depth of the valley to the left with the rock outcrops travelling down a vast distance of the valley face and a traceable waterfall on the right side. I stayed here for an hour and had the whole place to myself. It was magnificent, alternating between sitting at the chair reading then getting up and having another look.

“Wow..”

Another thing that makes amazement escape my lips are full solar eclipses and there is one happening tonight in the United States.

I saw my first one in Ceduna (South Australia) with my brother and his close friend Grant (writer of www.wherewordsfailblog.com) and it was astonishing, an unreal sight of celestial proportions that I will never forget. I saw another one in Cairns in 2012 with my life-long friend Tom (writer of www.GoneDragon.com) and his family though clouds chanced over our sighting. I had planned with a partner a long time ago to see the 2017 solar eclipse in the United States, however that relationship failed. The next full solar eclipse is in 2021 and will be visible from Antarctica – two things I would love to see.

I plan to chase full solar eclipses around the world for the rest of my life. If you haven’t seen one, do yourself a favour. It is unlike any other sight you have seen in the sky, it makes your mind do backflips and places you literally in the shadow of the grandeur of the universe.

Understanding your place in the universe makes you feel empowered because you can’t help but see with your own eyes that comparing your importance to the universe is foolish and pointless. Your importance comes in relation to the people around you, your meaningfulness with them. Meaning is relative, not absolute. Meaning within yourself as a person comes from the significance of your relationships with your family, your partner and your friends. A solar eclipse reminds you of your place and where meaning comes from. It is a deliverer of a “moment of clarity”.

Yeah anyway whatever so then I rode onto Armidale then Tamworth for the night then a fun ride down to a small town called Nundle. On the approach, I came flying round a corner to find a line of sheep crossing the road..

This is why you “look through the corner” when riding.

The ride on from here was fairly uneventful – the roads are straight and well tarred for the heavy country traffic that traverses this route, so I blasted through the kilometres on my way to Broke where the beautiful roads and gorgeous views re-emerged.

From here it was only a 6 kilometre run to the farm I am staying at for the next few nights. I’ll be working on a project which has been over a year in the making and I’m very excited to see it come to fruition. For now, this is home for the next few days and I’ll post again once I’ve ridden into Canberra.

One last thing..

Thanks for reading!