After the latest corona scare died down, I tried my luck again in another direction (that is, to anywhere but the midge-infested windy east coast). I made a 4-day round trip to Bendigo, staying overnight in Kilmore, Bendigo and Kyneton. The main objective was to ride the O’Keefe Rail Trail from Heathcote to Bendigo.
This was my first multi-day trip using the new Bosch ‘Nyon MY21’ eBike GPS/Computer that I’d been waiting for for a long time. Previous models of the Nyon weren’t certifiable for Australia; maybe I’m the first touring cyclist in Australia to have the new compliant model. The local bike shop where I bought it also installed it because there is some rewiring of the loom needed retrofit onto a pre-2020 bike. They also needed to run the Bosch computer diagnostics to reconfigure the electronics.
The computer changeover was done on 24 February, 2021, when the bike’s Intuvia computer odometer displayed a reading of 9,287 km (and hence, 1,802 km ridden between 1st Jan and 17 Mar 2021). I’m noting these figures down because, on the Bosch ‘eBike Connect’ app, the distance for both my connected eBikes is accumulated together. My other one in France had clocked 17,490 km. [I also clocked 15,600 km on my first R&M Delite eBike that was stolen, plus another 5,600 on 3 other temporary eBikes. This makes a grand total of about 48,000 km cycled since I started riding eBikes 4 years ago].
I’d already clocked up 522 km with the new Nyon before starting this trip, including a couple of 100-km one-dayers around Melbourne with my cycling buddy Pat to get used to the navigation function.
For this trip, I tried out yet another way of touring. I only used the generator twice in 7 days last time – once for a full charge, and once for a brief top-up – so I thought I’d leave it home this time and save 10 kg of weight. I did still take the trailer, though – stuffed full of camping gear and some food, and I still brought along all my weighty electronics, like the laptop and various chargers and batteries etc.
Wednesday 17 March 2021. Abbotsford • Kilmore |73 km|
[27°C and clear. Cloud cover 10% initially, rising to 40% throughout the day. No wind. 30 km on bike paths, then 25 km on a bike lane on the road shoulder, plus 20 km on busy narrow roads with no shoulder or verge].
The Bosch GPS has three modes of route planning. For a fully loaded bike, eMTB-mode is a problem because of it’s rough tracks, steep climbs and impossible downhills. ‘Scenic’ can sometimes be too scenic and I end up wondering why I’m going around in circles. More generally, it can be hard to pick up the route again after stopping for a break, or to start on a pre-determined route, because it always defaults to routing you to the precise starting point that it has in it’s memory, rather than any more logical alternative.
I used ‘Scenic’ mode for this part of the trip and it didn’t let me down.
I stopped briefly at Wandong to stock up on food at the IGA store. That’s because I didn’t know how big Kilmore was and I didn’t want to be caught short on supplies. Silly me – I should’ve just googled <Kilmore> . With 6,500 inhabitants, Kilmore is 5 times bigger than Wandong (pop. 1,300, and has a huge Coles supermarket (and soon it will have an Aldi and a Woolworth’s too, that are almost finished construction).
I remember I stopped at Wandong on October 5, 2017, on my way through to Tallarook to ride the Great Victorian Rail Trail, when I had to shelter from a sudden brief but heavy downpour under the town rotunda.
Kilmore was a pleasant surprise – a decent-sized, prosperous-looking country town that has retained some of it’s charm and architectural heritage. The caravan park wasn’t much to write home about though. In fact it was lousy – I give it 2 out of 5 stars, and it wasn’t particularly cheap either, at $30 just to pitch a tent (and ablute). But I suppose I had to consider myself lucky to even find a spot at all, as the only place left for me was an informal pitch hidden behind a row of cabins and up against the boundary hedge on the highway side.
My pitch was plagued by mosquitoes and I had to quickly scurry off to Coles to get some Aeroguard (works well, too!). The ‘camp kitchen’ was a bit of a joke – just a roof over a table and a rusty electric BBQ that you have to insert a dollar coin in to operate, and no kitchenware at all. I had no coins on me and so had to cook my spaghetti carbonara on my tiny gas burner in my one tiny pot.
Thursday 18 March 2021. Kilmore • Bendigo |113 km|
[27°C, up to 80% cloud cover by day’s end. No wind].
Just as I had feared the heavy traffic all night long right next to me put paid to any ambition of getting a good night’s sleep. At least it was to be an enjoyable and stress-free ride today.
There were 30 km of quiet bitumen through rolling countryside, then 20 km of dirt through hilly bushland, 50 km of compacted gravel on the Rail Trail and finally a few km of highway in Bendigo.
I stopped and bought a coke at the General Store in the quaint little village of Pyolong, halfway to Heathcote, and then bought lunch at a Chipper in Heathcote to eat at a table in the town park. I didn’t choose well – it was a truly execrable chicken schnitzel sandwich that I had to wait a half an hour for, and was almost cinder by the time they remembered to take it out of the boiling oil. They (the husband-and-wife Asian couple running the place) were working hard but seemed too overwhelmed trying to cope with their lunch time fish-and-chip crowd to deal with my fancy dish.
Here’s that boot again, can’t get over it!
The O’Keefe Trail was a bit ordinary to start off with as it finds it’s way out of Heathcote along regular streets, but quickly settles into what you’d expect – a compacted gravel surface, either on or alongside a railway embankment, that runs through sparsely-wooded reasonably flat countryside.
I soon came up to two other cyclists on eBikes. These were Richard and Sue from Canberra who were travelling around Victoria with their caravan, and were doing day rides in the district. Richard had accidently run through a caterpillar train crossing the road. Once the chain is broken, the caterpillars get very confused and just mill about in a big seething hairy clump.
Richard and Sue were both very friendly and although we didn’t ride together we were passing and repassing each other all the way to Axedale where they turned back to Heathcote to collect their car and drive back to their caravan at Daylesford.
Richard is competitive on the bike and made a race of it the last few km into Axedale, where we all had a cold drink and a laugh and went our respective ways. I beat him of course.
It was hot at 3 pm when I cycled into Bendigo looking for a place to stay the night. The first 2 caravan parks I tried were full (I just missed out on the last spot at the Big4 by a couple of minutes) but their groundkeeper suggested I try The Gold Nugget Tourist Park a few km north of the city, where I did manage to secure one of the last sites left (the lady behind me got the last one).
This was a much nicer and friendlier park than some others I’ve stayed at, and the well-kitted-out kitchen adjacent to my site was first-class. There was even a pool and I went for a welcome cooling-down swim.
Even having to fix a slow trailer puncture, caused by a piece of steel reinforcing wire I rolled over, didn’t faze me too much. I was contemplating taking the courtesy bus to the Huntley Hotel for dinner but instead opted to stay put and make spaghetti Carbonara again (but this time in an excellent camp kitchen). I even settled for Diet Coke with my bourbon as that’s all the camp kiosk had in the cola department – well, except for Pepsi, which is a definite no-no in my book.
A group of rowdy pensioners decided to run their cards night in that echoey room just behind my bike in the photo above, but it had all quietened down by 10.30 and I got a good night’s sleep. Very impressive sunset too.
Friday 19 March 2021. Bendigo • Kyneton |90 km|
[27°C; no wind and 10 – 50% cloud cover as the day wore on]
I had to scout out some bike shops in Bendigo to buy another tube of patching glue since my old tube had dried out – I reckon I’ve never used more than 10% of a tube of glue yet! The shops didn’t open until 10 am so I made it a leisurely get-away from the caravan park and then a leisurely 10-km ride into town along the Bendigo Creek Trail. The city’s information centre was slightly helpful for once. They had no idea about how to get on to the Goldfields trail or what it was like, but at least they were able to direct me to the nearest bike shop.
The guys at Giant bikes knew all about the Gold Fields trail and basically told me to forget it. It is all stony single track with tree roots and boulders on steep inclines that I would have trouble with because of the trailer. They said the first section as far as Mount Alexander is the easiest and I could possibly do it, and there were a few places I could bail out onto the highway if I needed to.
With this rather mixed message, I decided to at least check it out and followed their directions to the Queens Arms Hotel, where I could then easily follow the signs to join the trail proper. That turned out to be a convenient starting point because I was able to get myself a schnitzel sandwich and vanilla slice (and pint of Dare iced coffee) from ‘Country Cakes’ just down the road, and eat it at the bench under the hotel awning. The day was already heating up.
After umming and arring for ages and trying to decipher the trail signage where it splits and rejoins as separate walking and cycling sections, I proceeded along what I took to be the cycle track for a couple of hundred metres. This was through bush-bashing single-track that descended into a gully. I didnt like the look of that!
An MTBer (Mountain Trail Bike Rider) came along at pace and I stopped him to ask about the way ahead. He took one look at the trailer and said I’d better gird myself for a bit of portage. (That’s journalistic licence there – he didn’t use the words ‘gird’ or ‘portage’, but that’s what he meant).
Well, that was good enough for me – I wasn’t about to get myself into trouble by ignoring local advice, especially advice I’d asked for, so I turned around and took a more mundane route to Kyneton. This easier ride involved a steady 1,000m of climbing all day. There was nowhere along the way until Malmsbury, just a few km from Kyneton, where I could even buy a cool drink. Luckily, I had a litre of icy cold water on me, in two ‘Klean Kanteen’ thermos flasks, that I had chilled in the Gold Nugget campers’ fridge.
The very quiet ‘Bendigo-Sutton Grange Road’ that I was traveling on crosses over the M79 freeway near Elphinstone and becomes the C794 to Taradale. Just past this junction there was a road crew at work doing lane-marking, and their flashing ‘slow down’ trailer sign parked on the side of the road made a convenient and safe place for me to sit down and take a breather.
Out with the thermos, and a long slug of ice-cold water. After a good 20 minutes of rest perched up on the trailer I resumed riding and didn’t need another drink until Malmsbury, 15 km down the road. But uh-oh. No thermos. Yep, I’d left it sitting back on that road-sign trailer. Too late to go back for it now – it was past knock-off time and the workers would surely have found it sitting there on the tow bar when they hitched up their trailer to tow it back to the depot. A new one cost me $72. Just the sipping lid alone costs $13.95. On the plus side though, I did find a clock on the side of the road.
The caravan park in Kyneton went out of business 3 years ago. I guess it paid the price for the new freeway bypassing town. I tried two flea-bitten hotels in town and to my amazement they were both fully booked-out. They really did look dreadful too. I was going to continue on to Carlsrhue (just as well I didn’t – not a thing there!) but the bartender in the second pub said I should try the Kyneton Springs Motel. He’d just called them up himself and sent another tourist around there because they did have a vacancy.
Lucky for me, and not so lucky for the other tourists, they decided to go shopping first before dropping around to the Motel and I got the last room. They arrived just after I’d finished checking-in.
The Kyneton Springs Motel has seen better days and is undergoing major renovations. The entranceway portico and one wing of the motel building were all ripped apart and under reconstruction. But the owner, Kathy, was friendly and my room was spotless though old-fashioned. Like, 1980s old-fashioned. I guess that’s why she’s doing the refit. I figured $110 for the night was a bargain compared to any alternative accommodation scenario. For a while there I had thought I might have to go to the station and catch a train home.
I went for a walk back into town and came across the ‘Monsieur Pierre market and gourmet food emporium’ on the main street. It lived up to its grandiose name and I got a selection of nice (and healthy) goodies to take back to the room to go with the excellent Cornish pasty I’d already gotten from the ‘Piper Street Food Company’ store one block from the motel. Plus a couple of cans of beer, this made a great feast while watching a football game on TV, with enough left over for breakfast.
Saturday 20 March 2021. Kyneton • Melbourne |99 km|
I took a meandering track back to Melbourne, in the ‘Scenic’ mode of GPS-directed navigation. This was mostly on country roads C793 and 792 as far as Woodend and then onto some rough tracks through the Macedon Regional Park. A couple of these tracks proved impassible, the same ones I had difficulties with several weeks ago going the other way , but it was no big deal this time around.
After Macedon, it was then an easy run down through Gisborne and Sunbury on cycle lanes alongside heavy traffic to where Melbourne’s outer urban sprawl begins. I can’t help thinking I went the wrong side around Tullamarine International Airport, though, because the route through the suburbs afterwards was quite convoluted and avoided any of the bike paths that I know do run to near my place from the airport.
– ends –