Day Four: To Miriam Vale

The group had decided we'd try to ride together, so I expected it to be harder than riding by myself. This was a 60km day that was always going to be pretty hard. Once we arrived Ev and me weighed our bikes and both are over 100kg excluding rider. But that's harder on Ev as he only weighs 55kg to start with, so he's pushing nearly twice his body weight, whereas I'm only at slightly over mine. But we both really felt the 60kms.

When we woke up Anne said she couldn't handle the cold and her dodgy gear (she doesn't have a sleeping bag, just a doona, and her tent is crap). She barely slept and just shivered all night, and she's been struggling a bit with the riding. Oh, and she gave up smoking when she started the ride, so that's not easy either. So she pulled out, and that took a bit out of the rest of us at the start of the day.

We rode about 200m to the campground up the road and got water, then a couple of km to the servo on the Bruce Highway. So I didn't get warmed up until after 10am, when we started on the highway. The road was pretty stressful, lots of big trucks and not great shoulders. We stopped again an hour later at another roadhouse and had ice creams. This was where we'd originally planned to camp last night, so about 11:30am we are at the start of the planned ride... hence the 60km day today. Hope was losing the plot by now, so people lost interest in riding together and I took off to the lunch spot at the half way point, about 10km away.

Lunch spot was harder to get to than I expected, in retrospect because my rear tyres were probably down to 80psi or so instead of 100psi. I hung out there for a while, dried out my fly and some other stuff and took portrait photos of the riders.

Cassie arrived after half an hour or so and started official lunch stuff for everyone (I graze, so there's no preparation), and I hung around until everyone except Ev and Val had arrived. I was just ready to go when Val appeared on the horizon, but Hope was sleeping so she wanted to just keep rolling. I chased off after her.

Hope woke again about 10km out of Miriam Vale and we stopped so Val could feed her a bit. Georgina arrived a few minutes later, just as I was getting twitchy so I took off and left her to help Val. I was getting seriously tired by that point, and the last 10km were not much fun at all. But by the time I got there I had a text message with directions to Pete's house, and a quick phone call cleared up the fine print, so I was there by about 4:30pm. Much relief! Pete is Robyn's father and an amazing host... him and his partner Gillian drove around scouting roads for us, gave us beds and showers for two nights, fed us and (most important) let us use their Internet connection :)