2,738 km in 28 days
Day 28 Route Map
Oh, but this was a bloody hard day! There appears to be no way – no easy way, anyway, not one that I could find – to actual ride a bicycle into Brisbane from the north! The only through road, the A1/M1/Bruce Highway bans bicycles and all the criss-crossing side routes seem to go nowhere.
I picked up a nasty double puncture in the rear tyre from a self-tapping screw thoughtlessly discarded into the road shoulder. In fact, since Maryborough excessive amounts of debris in the hard shoulder have been a constant nightmare. I tried to repair the tube at Landsborough for over an hour (4 times) but it was unfixable and I even managed to also shred the trailer tyre and tube when I used the servo air pump to top it up.
I had to wheel the dead bike over to the Landsborough station and catch a train one stop back to Beerwah (2-hour wait for a 5 minute ride) to get to a bike shop before closing time. I bought a new tube for the rear tyre (the punctured one was almost brand new, bought 4 days ago in Maryborough), plus tyre and tube for the trailer from Mitch, who was really helpful.
It was then a 20km run into Calboolture on a narrow, busy and verge-less road that was very scary – so scary I felt the need to defibrillate in the very ordinary Caboolture motel for the night, with some KFC and Jack Daniel to settle me down.
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