Day 29: Cunningham's Gap to Warwick

Woke at 4:30am for a pee, turned on phone to check time and got another SMS from Robyn hoping I'm ok despite her failure to help. Too early, so back to sleep. Woke again about 6:30am and got up properly. Photo times will spell out exact schedule, but shortly after I started I got to a sign "8% uphill next 5.7km". Yay.

Sure enough, 7.7km into the day I'm at the top of Cunningham's Gap and it's definitely rain forest... it's raining. I take photos of wet rainforest, wet cars, wet signs and so on. Stats for the uphill: 7.7km, 1:14 taken, 6.22km/h average speed, 18km/h max. I am about50km from Warwick, so will load ap, find raincoat,and venture slowly downhill. If it was dry I'd want to go really really fast, but in the wet with brakes only on the lightly loaded front wheels... no.

Later: turns out that the downhill is only steep-ish for 3km, then there's a long cruise down the valley at about 25kph with a gentle tail wind. Road surface ranges from amazingly good to appalling, so my speed sometimes drops below 20kph on the gentle downhills! Got caught by a local media photographer going into town, he's doing one of the "24 photos in 24 hours" assignments so I might make it into the local paper. Hopefully he'll ring me and I can scrounge copies of the shots, coz there looks like a cople of nice ones. I was a bit flat at that point, bad road surfaces make it hard to stay cheerful especially on drizzly days... wah wah wah, I'm just waiting to go home really.

But I make it into Warwick by 11am, then head to the info centre to book a bus ticket. They direct me to a bus company who can't help because their computer is down. So I use the 13... number from a phone box. The bike is at the mercy of the driver (as expected) but it's half price if it's disassembled... this could be fun. How hard am I willing to work to make the quad look disassembled? To save $27? Answer: not very hard.

Plan for the rest of the day involves finding a shower and internet, eating and trying to stay awake until the bus arrives at 10pm. Yay.

Later: public internet access here sucks. Two options, both are locked down and IE-only, so I can't upload photos. So I read, wait, eat and read until 10pm, the bike goes under the bus, I go into the bus, I get to sleep sitting up for the night. Yay.