A 10-day circular eBike trip out of Melbourne – into the Yarra Ranges, across Gippsland, over Australia’s Great Dividing Range and then looping back around to Melbourne on the Murray-to-Mountains Rail Trail and the Hume Highway (M31).
Hey, that track looks like a mini-Australia – I shoulda ducked down to Tolmie and back up to Benalla (as per the black line) to make a Gulf of Carpentaria and complete the illusion huh? Maybe next time!
Day 1. Tuesday 4 May 2021. Abbotsford to Powelltown |55 km; 519m of climbing|
[Cool, ~15°C, and cloudy with misty rain. Equal parts flat dirt rail trail and undulating paved country road C425]
I didn’t get away from home until late (11.30am), and so to make a reasonable amount of progress for the day I just rode the 2½ kilometers to Richmond Station and got on a train. This time I went to the end of the line at Lilydale. That train ride shows as the short straight-line section of my route heading east from Melbourne in the map above.
I made this trip in full “expedition” mode, with the petrol generator on board in the trailer, plenty of warm clothing and lots of food and water. The all-up weight of bike + luggage was 90 kg.
On any given day I’d be out of range of mains power and possibly food stores as well, and winter was rapidly approaching. In fact this trip was very carefully planned to coincide with a forecast weather window before the first major snow falls of the season closed-off some of the roads I intended to travel on.
On the train the left-hand ‘bull-horn’ of my new handlebar grips somehow got caught in one of the carriage’s floor-to-ceiling holding posts and I managed to rip the handlebar brake lever out getting it untangled. Yikes! No back brakes! However, Yarra Valley Cycles is right next to the Lilydale Railway Station and luckily they had two possible remedies – a like-for-like replacement Deore XT (lever-only) for $160, or a complete new ‘standard’ Shimano brake assembly for $60. I chose the cheaper option, and paid a further $20 to have it fitted, which took about half-an-hour. So now I’ve got a spare brake caliper piston set that I don’t really need.
Not such an auspicious start to my trip! Feeling a bit deflated and $80 lighter, it was 1.30 by the time I got away from Lilydale and by 4.30 and still not feeling much better about the situation, I was in Powelltown. I’d had enough for the day, and the Wikicamps App advised I could free-camp there at “The Hall”.
I had a really good chat to 2 council workers when I pulled in and that restored my good humour. They were super friendly and even tried to talk me into staying-on for an extra night. The pub would be open by then (it’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays) and also the Upper Yarra Angling Club would be having a get-together and playing indoor bowls in the Hall, to which I was invited. And you know what? I seriously considered the offer too!
It was drizzling rain when I set up my tent on the lawn in between two picnic tables. It’s always so convenient to have such bench-tables close by. First task, of course, was to set the batteries to charging on the generator, which I did in under the tiny verandah of the hall itself to keep the rain off. As per usual, I only charged to 85% capacity (5th cell lights just beginning to flash). That’s because the final 15% is a trickle charge and takes up nearly half the total charging time, and apparently it’s not so good for the battery life if the charge repeatedly goes outside the middle 15 – 85% of capacity.
Although there were intermittent rain showers all night I was able to work around them for cooking and eating, but it was still only very early by the time I crawled into my cosy tent and settled in to start reading my latest book on the Kindle E-reader (“Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells US, What it Doesn’t, And Why It Matters”, by Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the Energy Department, a guy called Steve Koonin – just in case you were wondering. Highly recommended!).
Day 2. Wednesday 5 May 2021. Powelltown to Toorongo Falls |38 km; 707m of climbing|
[A sunny morning once the sun cleared the hills at 8.30 and burned off the mist by 9.30 to dry out the tent].
I’d made a big mistake in assuming I’d be able to buy petrol in Powelltown (and in not bringing a separate fuel container along). I needed petrol to top up the generator, which has 2.1 l tank capacity and runs for about 5-6 hours on a full tank. This is sufficient to completely recharge both eBike batteries twice. One full charge safely gives me about 120 km range under ‘normal’ conditions, but it can be as low as 60 km in extremely hilly terrain – and I was headed into ‘extremely hilly’. This is in line with the Bosch Range Guidance so their figures can be relied on.
The locals told me the next town, Noojee, is bigger than Powelltown, and Google Maps told me there was fuel available there, so I wasn’t unduly worried. I stopped off on the way to investigate the old railway bridge known as The Trestle Bridge – that’s the new me, taking the time to ‘smell the roses’ and see all the local sights!
The batteries started depleting alarmingly on that short 27km ride to Noojee, and when I got there I found there was no petrol available. The bowser, and the general store it was in front of, were definitely out of business – all locked up and full of cob-webs.
I figured I still had enough fuel for at least one more decent recharge. This would be enough to get me back downhill to the petrol stations at Yarra Junction but I could forget about the 58km/ 1,600m climb to Mount Baw Baw (with no petrol there either, according to Google). The climb to Mount Baw Baw is rated as the toughest road cycle hill climb in Australia Cycling Mt Baw Baw. Anyway, uncharacteristically I decided to just chill out and forget about it and at least enjoy camping out for another night before heading back into Yarra Junction the next day. I decided on a spot called Toorongo Falls. This explains the very short distance I covered this day.
The photo above isn’t the actual Toorongo Falls, by the way. To be honest I didn’t even get to see the falls. It was a 3 km walk to view them, and there was no guarantee the rain would stay away longer than the hour or so it would have taken for me to get there and back. Anyway, ‘Toorongo Cascades’ might be a more apt term for them going by the Bing images I looked at:
When I arrived at the Toorongo campsite it was still quite early (around 2pm). There was no one else camping there and the only person around was a day-tripper in his early 30s with his flat-top ute who was fly-fishing for salmon. I think he caught one too, because at one point he was certainly cooking something that looked like a fish on his fancy gas cooker mounted on back of his ute. But he was quite cagey about it. I think he took my flippant remark “Oh, you’ve brought back some dinner then have you” as me inviting myself over to share it with him (I wasn’t!), and we spoke no more.
Later, a tiny decrepit-looking camper van rocked up and the older couple in it with their two highly-trained Waimerama-type dogs established camp at a respectful distance from me. They gave me two small fire-starter bricks to get my campfire going (I’d already tried and failed because the wood was so wet), and in the morning before I left we had another good chat about our respective wanderings around Australia.
A young couple in a hotted-up Holden had come in in the dead of night and plopped a tiny tent on the ground near me. The tent didn’t look very weather-proof and they’d had to endure a cold wet night, judging by the fact they scrambled into their car at day-break and turned the heater on.
Day 3. Thursday 6 May 2021. Toorongo Falls to Lake Narracan |94 km; 1,361m of climbing|
[Cold night, followed by a cold and cloudy morning; clearing by midday: 8 -17°C. 8km of compacted dirt track out of Toorongo Falls, then all bitumen: C426 to Piedmont; C425 to Warragul; minor paved roads with no shoulder to Lake Narracan. Heavy traffic after 3pm].
The sun didn’t come up from behind the escarpment until 9am and I was away by 9.15 so the tent was still wet when I packed it away. Back in Noojee, a guy mowing the pub’s lawn said I could get petrol ‘up the hill’ at Neerim Junction which is only 9km away. This was more-or-less on the way to Walhalla where I had wanted to go in the first place (but in a round-about direction).
But it sure turned out to be some monster 400m climb ‘up the hill’ to get to the Junction! Surprisingly, the batteries were still showing a good reading and since I still had enough fuel for at least one more recharging session, I knew I could push on. At the next town, Neerim South, the fuel station was one of those unmanned ones where you had to call a number, provide credit card details and specify a dollar amount before the pump was activated. This was all too complicated for me when I only had a jerry can that needed an indefinite amount of between about 2 to 3 litres to fill it. It was all downhill from there to Warragul anyway, so I again passed up on the opportunity to buy fuel and just pigged out on a chicken schnitzel burger/ apricot pie/ Dare iced coffee breakfast to refuel myself instead. And sat in the bakery for an hour or so to defrost my frozen extremities.
At this juncture, I was resolved to just to give the whole trip away and return to Melbourne in defeat on the first train out of Warragul. I cursed myself for not thinking through the whole fuel supply thing. I had been too averse to the notion of carrying any unnecessary weight and had thought the 2.1 l in the generator tank would be sufficient to see me through between fuel stations. Not so, it seems.
It was a lovely and speedy downhill ride all the way from Neerim Junction to the outskirts of Warragul, where, as promised by Google, I duly encountered a BP Service Station. For $20 I bought a proper 6 l fuel container and was on my merry way again, all thoughts of abandoning the ride now forgotten. I also got over the disappointment of not visiting Walhalla and set my sights on Dargo. This marked the point of no return in terms of chickening-out on the rest of my ride.
I encountered a strong (20km/h) north-easterly wind as soon as I turned east at Warragul, and had to use the generator to charge up for 1½ hours at a non-descript place on the side of Darnum Park Road close to the Fonterra dairy factory where I was semi-protected from the annoying easterly by a small tree plantation. That’s 3 times in 3 days I had used the generator, and with no other viable power options really available it had already justified my lugging the darn thing around behind me.
After a mentally healthy day of good cycling and making some decent progress, I rolled in late into the ‘Lake Narracan Caravan Park and Camping Ground’, where, for $34, I was given carte blanche to pitch my tent on any unpowered patch of ground. This I did close to the laundry, where, at the park owner’s suggestion, I promptly set about recharging the batteries on one of the laundry power outlets.
My friendly neighbours were a Maori couple who have been chasing the dream of working around Australia for the past couple of years. Their line of work mostly involves dismantling coal-fired power stations. We are fond of doing this here in Australia, so they will have a long and prosperous future ahead of them I’m sure.
Speaking of power stations, the operating Yallourn W Brown Coal Power Station was only a couple of kilometers away from the caravan park and its incessant throbbing hum all night was a tad annoying. But It won’t be for much longer – it is due to be dismantled soon too. Yep, according to the power company’s website they’re going to scrap a perfectly good 1450 MW power station that currently supplies 22% of Victoria’s electricity, and replace it with a ‘350 MW’ battery (a meaningless term for batteries, did they mean MWh?) that will supply precisely zero percent of Victoria’s electricity demand. People should realize that batteries do not generate electricity – they only store it.
Dinner consisted of the other half of my lunchtime schnitzel sandwich and a can of Red Bull. But I was happy.
Day 4. Friday 7 May 2021. Lake Narracan to 6km North of Briagalong |106 km; 552m of climbing|
[Much milder night last night (14°C) and a calm sunny day up to 22°C. 28 km on busy minor roads to Glengarry, then 54 km on the Gippsland Plains Rail Trail to Maffra, and finally 24 km on the quiet C493 minor road].
The weather turned for the better and I had an easy ride on the back roads all the way to Glengarry. The ‘Award Winning Pies in Australia’ shop that I visited last time I came through here (#30 Eden to Melbourne) had gone out of business – I guess their pies weren’t that good after all – and now the IGA right next door has taken on the mantle (with an even poorer version pie). Still, Glengarry was a pleasant-enough place to sit down off the bike for 20 minutes and enjoy a second breakfast.
My Post #30 goes into more detail of the East Gippsland Rail Trail (but travelling in the opposite direction). Be aware that coming from the west there’s one tricky bit near Cowarr where the trail completely disappears for 5 km. This missing portion is well explained and sign-posted coming from the east but is not sign-posted at all when coming from the west. To avoid any confusion, pay attention to my micro-route around there.
Maffra is a sizeable town and I stocked up there on provisions at the local Woolworths supermarket (as well as charging up for a couple of hours at an electrical power outlet in one of the BBQ shelters in the recreation park while chatting amiably to a Taiwanese-Australian couple).
My provisions included 3 tins of ‘Podravka’ brand Beef Goulash from Croatia and 3 tins of ‘Home-Brand’ creamed rice. These are my favourite main course and dessert course dishes for camping at the moment. But a warning: the Home-Brand version of the rice which costs $1 a tin – ⅓ the price of the Parson’s variety that tastes the same and has exactly the same ingredients – comes in a non-ring-pull can. To open it I had to use the clumsy attachment on my trusty Leatherman tool. This can be a bit tricky (especially for a left-hander) if you want to avoid lacerating your hands on all the sharp edges created in hacking the lid off. (And don’t, whatever you do, lick the lid – it’s sharp!).
Briagolong is a quaint little village too, but the general store there had little to offer, provision-wise, other than a packet of Ginger Nut biscuits. The store owner said a lot of people free-camp at the Quarry Reserve 6 km out of town on the Freestone Creek Road. I was already heading for there anyway, guided by WikiCamps, so it was good to get local confirmation. I’ve found WikiCamps to be an excellent and reliable source of information regarding wild camping spots and caravan parks.
And Quarry Reserve did not disappoint. It’s a large, well-equipped free camp alongside a creek, with two pristine drop toilets, a large open-sided block house, picnic tables and garbage bins. There was one grey nomad couple already there, but I camped at the other end of the reserve about 400m away so that the noise of my generator – humming away from 4.30 till 7pm – did not disturb them. It wasn’t cold at all and it was a beautiful cloudless night with all the stars blazing. I got to enjoy a peaceful slumber from 8.30 till 5.30. That’s almost a record for me!
Dusk at Quarry Reserve
Dawn at Quarry Reserve
Day 5. Saturday 8 May 2021. 6km N of Briagolong to Dargo |73 km; 1,188m of climbing|
The day dawned beautiful. I was up well before the 7 o’clock sunrise but waited around until 9am for the sun to burn the night’s dew off my tent before packing it away and leaving. I’d forgotten to get any potable water in Briagalong and had run out so I went down to the creek and filled up all my containers (all 3 litres worth) and boiled it. But in the end, the nomad couple gave me 2 litres out of their ample drinking water supply so I ended up chucking out most of the boiled river water. It still tasted a bit funny.
It was an arduous though exhilarating ride then on reasonable dirt for 40 km to Marnappa, where the Freestone Creek track I was on meets the C601 bitumen road to the small village of Dargo. I didn’t see a single other moving vehicle on that section of track the whole way, though I did see some groups camping at a few of the many ideal camping spots all along the river for the first 10 kilometers or so. A site called Blue Pool looked especially inviting.
After Blue Pool the road is unsuitable for caravans. It is steep and twisting with a rubbly, slippery surface, but above all in places it is too narrow for two cars to pass. I’d hate to be trying to reverse back down one of the steeper sections with a caravan in tow to give way to oncoming traffic.
I recharged the batteries using the generator for 1½ hours (which took it from 18% to 75% of full charge) at the abandoned gold diggings of Granite Creek, 30 km from Dargo, but it turned out to be all downhill from there into Dargo anyway so I probably didnt need to recharge at all. My plan had been to camp at a Wiki-suggested free camp called ‘2-mile flat’ several kilometers the other side of Dargo and in case there were already campers there, I wanted to get enough charge into the batteries so that I wouldn’t have to fire up the generator in the camp that evening.
I was low on supplies again already but everything in the Dargo General Store was ridiculously expensive. Not that they had much of interest to tempt me anyway. But in the store they did mention that camping is allowed behind the Dargo pub for a fee of $10. There were two big mobs of 4-wheel drivers in town for the weekend who had filled up all the pub’s 16 accommodation cabins and spilled over into the large sheep paddock behind the pub and alongside the river. I paid my $10 and also a $50 deposit on a key to the pub’s toilet. The toilet was never locked anyway, so since you can only get your deposit back in cash from the general store, I reckoned the whole deposit thing is just a crafty ploy to get you to spend money in their store. And it worked on me – I spent $46 of that $50 in the store next morning.
I had a great camping spot down by the river next to a 50-ish couple, Tim and Jackie, in their massive and well-appointed all-terrain expedition vehicle. Tim insisted I charge up my batteries off their 240V truck outlet, so that was good of him. I had an early dinner in the pub – a not-so-cheap $45 rack-of-lamb plus a few beers (the first alcohol this trip) – and sat round Tim and Jackie’s campfire having a really wide-ranging conversation with them until late. We polished off 3 bottles of red wine between the 3 of us too.
Day 6. Sunday 9 May 2021. Dargo to 14 km before B500 road junction |58 km; 2,084m of climbing|
This was the day of reckoning for me.
After spending my key deposit money at the store on a steak sandwich and choco milk to have now, plus, for later on: a crappy mettwurst sausage (later chucked out), a tin of peas and carrots (still got it!), 2 tablets of hexamine fire starter (still got ’em too), 2 litres of water (saved my life) and a packet of sweets ($46 – kerchink!) I headed north out of town by 8am in good spirits.
Oh – that was after realising I’d lost my helmet somewhere. Luckily someone had found it and handed in to the pub bar and the morning cook remembered seeing it on a shelf near the front door. That was after the owner’s wife declared, after taking a showy cursory glance around, that no, it had definitely not been handed-in. So thank you, morning cook! Lucky he overhead me talking to his boss, eh.
At first, it was a deceptively easy ride on the flat on a tarred road for a couple of kilometers out of town but that quickly gave way to a monster climb, the first of many that day. The road soon deteriorated to a slippery-in-parts/ rubbly-in-other-parts dirt track. Boulder-sized chunks of rock had been lifted out of the road surface by the constant hammering of fast-moving 4wd’s and lay strewn across the road, and the holes where they’d been had filled with water. Good thing I’d avoided the camping ground at 2-mile flat last night too, because it was down a very steep and slushy road that I’d probably never have made it back up out of.
But on to more pressing current problems: the batteries gave out after only 30 km and I had to have a charging session on the side of the road for 2 hours. During this, the entire contingent of 20-odd 4wd vehicles from the pub last night all went roaring past in convoy, and there was no more traffic then for the rest of the day. I had to climb some of those hills in up to 9 stages, resting for several moments between stages to get my breath back while standing astride the bike and leaning against the handlebars clenching the brakes to stop me from sliding backwards.
Up on the High Plain proper it got even more arduous if anything, because in the boggy terrain a combination of standing water and all the 4wd traffic had turned the roadway into a slushy gully. The bike had no steerage-way and gracefully slid over onto its side a couple of times, and I had to push it through ankle-deep mud for 50m a couple of times – that was no mean feat with the bike and trailer weighing-in at a hefty 90 kg.
The batteries ran down again after only another 30km. Not knowing what was ahead terrain-wise, I thought I’d better stop and recharge straightaway when I came to an old campsite on a flat section. It was very cold by then, down to 3°C, and with a biting wind and gusts of horizontal sleet tormenting me, it felt even colder.
It was a difficult decision for me to simply stay put for the night, which is what I ended up doing. On the plus side, I had plenty of warmth and enough food and water to last for several days but on the negative side the weather outlook was not promising – the first major snowstorm of the season was forecast to arrive later that night.
The problem with the forecast was that I knew the authorities close the Dargo High Plains Road to all traffic at the first hint of snow by physically locking it off, and by my reckoning I still had 16-odd km to go before hitting the bitumen main road where the gate is.
So it was a somewhat nerve-wracking and sobering experience huddling there in my tent on that desolate wind-swept plain the whole night. There was a wide circle of trees around my campsite and all night long it sounded as though a freight train was coming through every 5 minutes as successive wind gusts came roaring through the trees. I just couldn’t get it into my head that, no, it probably wasn’t a freight train, and it tricked me every time.
The following picture shows what it could have been like up there on those windswept plains if the weather had been kinder:
Day 7. Monday 10 May 2021. 14 km before B500 to Myrtleford |96 km; 1,973m of climbing|
All 1,900m of climbing on this day was done in those first 16 km out to the main road, so as you can imagine it was pretty tough going for me, even with the eBike in ‘TURBO’ mode the whole way.
The forecast snow never showed up but it was still a bitterly cold 3°C and windy and raining for most of my journey out of there. I had rugged up with my Long John Icebreaker under-trousers beneath my cycling shorts and outdoors over-trousers. This was the first (and last) day I wore long pants for the whole trip – I actually find I’m getting quite immune to feeling the cold in my lower body. But I do wish I’d put my under-trousers on over my cycling shorts, because I developed a painful case of saddle sores and chafing as a result of that one day of not paying enough attention to saddle comfort.
I also wore my new ‘proper’ winter gloves, which are a right pain in the ass putting on. That’s because there’s an inner layer, the fingers of which seem to pull back out and bunch up every time I take the gloves off, making it almost impossible to wriggle my fingers back in the full distance when I put them back on. Or do I just not know enough about wearing gloves? Anyone? Any tips on re-gloving? Couldn’t find any help on Google. I did find that biting-on each finger-tip as I pulled that glove-finger out seemed to help a bit.
Afterwards, I looked at my route through there on Google Earth. Well that’s mighty impressive, I thought – and probably just as well the clouds prevented me from looking over the edge.
A couple of hundred metres before the summit I was back in phone service and received a call I had been expecting. I managed to pull over onto a col where the ground was flat enough to keep the parked bike upright and from where I could get going again (but only with some difficulty).
It seemed quite surreal talking to a colleague in balmy Vancouver while perched on the side of a mountain up in the clouds and scudding rain for 18 minutes. It’s usually the other way round. At the time, I still didn’t know that my salvation, in the form of the bitumen main road, was only 200m away at the top of the steepest climb yet.
It was a sharp drop in elevation from the B500 intersection all the way into the pretty little village of Harrietville. Visibility was down to 30m and my hands were clenched on both brakes the whole way down.
There’s nothing much in Harrietville. They didn’t even accept credit cards but luckily I had enough cash left over from pre-COVID days (that’s how little we use cash in Melbourne!) to buy a hot chocolate and two gourmet pies (service only through a window counter) that I woofed down like a ravenous dog while standing astride my bike in the misty rain.
It was a really pleasant ride from Harrietville to Bright, where I dallied only long enough to recharge the batteries on the generator for 2 hours at the Apex Park, and then I was on to Myrtleford on my favourite bike trail of them all – the Murray to Mountains Rail Trail. It’s my favourite because it’s paved – I’ve obviously gotten soft by being spoiled by all those super-highway bike paths in Europe.
The Myrtleford Caravan Park is friendly and very conveniently located in the centre of town and only a couple of hundred metres from the Woolworths supermarket. This was just as well, because I had to go and buy provisions and it was raining most of the time I was in Myrtleford. I don’t know how tenting patrons would get on in summer though, since we are put right up against the fence of the tennis court next door, and excessive light and noise must be a problem of an evening.
The park’s camp kitchen was built on a grand scale and I had it all to myself. I made full use of it too, and avoided having to deal with all that rain whilst cooking etc., and even got to charge up all my electronics. My ‘cooking’ has devolved to simply heating up tinned food because of (or at least the excuse they give) is that compliance with COVID restrictions has mandated they lock away all their plates and utensils etc.
Day 8. Tuesday 11 May 2021. Mytrleford to Benalla |106 km; 226m of climbing|
It was trying not to rain, and almost succeeding, when I put away a wet tent and headed off down the Rail Trail again early in the morning for the long and uneventful but tedious ride to Benalla. Don’t get me wrong – it was most enjoyable, but I was suffering from a slight touch of saddle-soreness.
As mentioned earlier, I blame this soreness on wearing the long johns during my freezing ride yesterday under and not over my padded bicycle shorts, and there was a lot of chafing going on.
Today’s ride was mostly flat (only 226m ascent, with 52m decline overall) and most of it (61 km) was on the paved rail trail that took me through pleasant cleared sheep and cattle grazing country or natural bushland.
From the town of Wangaratta I rode on the C313 road. This was busy for the first 13 km to Glenrowan but then almost deserted for the remaining 32 km almost all the way to Benalla.
Glenrowan is a small town that has made a rather kitsch tourist niche for itself (especially among the bus-travelling pensioner brigade, I couldn’t help but notice) by cashing-in on the Ned Kelly bushranger legend.
Just before the village of Winton the C313 road passes the Glenrowan West solar farm. It’s impressively huge – 373,000 panels – and goes on for a couple of kilometers alongside the road. But the panels were all pointing southwest, ie. seemingly away from the sun when I rode past at 4.30 pm and this perplexed me.
The answer to this conundrum must lay in the fact that they’re built on a single-axis (NNW/SSE) tracking swivel that has to flip over every day after the zenith to track the sun across the sky. I’m sure it’s the most efficient arrangement (for single-axis tracking, that is) but it still must make for a very low photon-gathering efficiency before about 10am and after about 3pm every day from April to October because the sun’s rays are only very obliquely striking the panels then. Funny what goes through your head when you’re plodding along on a bike, but there ya go!
By the way, their website blurb gives the installed capacity of this array as ‘a peak output of 149MW’ (but this is misleading as that’s only only DC – Direct Current – which converts to 119 MW AC – they never quite get around to pointing that out, do they?) Furthermore, using Australia’s actual average output for solar cells of 4kWh per day per kW installed, only 470 MWh per day, on average over a year, is actually generated. Then, using Victoria’s average annualized daily household electricity consumption of 41kWh per day, that translates to enough electricity to power 11,000 homes – and not the ‘up to 44,000’ they again misleadingly lay claim to. Such 4-fold capacity-to-utilization factor is very typical of renewable energy claims, and very deceitful.
Sitting on a chair at the roadside in Winton next to her car and a table was Daniella, who was selling scented soap.
What the…! I mean…there can’t be more than 2 or 3 people per day who would be travelling along that road who would actually stop to buy soap surely, you’d think. Could there? Anyway, she seemed quite happy and we had a nice little chat and I even had enough cash left on me to make the minimum spend of $5 for the smallest soap she had on offer.
WikiCamps suggested the Benalla Showgrounds as a camping spot but I chickened out when I got there because it’s another one of those that’s supposed to be for RVs only. So I back-tracked 3 km to the Holiday Park that I’d ridden straight past already, located in an industrial estate on the northern outskirts of town where it cost $34 for an unpowered site. Being right up against a factory, the park was a bit noisy but they had an excellent camp kitchen and ablutions block, so no complaints. I stuffed myself on a ½-chicken and coleslaw that I got from Charcoal Chicken a couple of km from the park, and had enough left over for breakfast.
Day 9. Wednesday 12 May 2021. Benalla · Broadford |139 km; 692m of climbing|
I had the sniff of home now, and wasted no time roaring off at 8am onto the M31 (Hume Highway) for the long ride ahead of me to Melbourne. I knew I wouldn’t make it to Melbourne that day (it was still 230 km away after all!) but I wanted to put as much distance as possible behind me because bad weather was once again forecast, for 2 days time.
I stopped to rest up every 15 km or so. My bum was really hurting from the saddle sores by now, and I found it difficult to sit still on the saddle for long periods. Luckily the M31 was ideal for me in this condition, being smooth and relatively flat. The traffic was extremely busy, but as I was off to the side in the wide breakdown lane that I had all to myself I never left in any danger.
At the Coach Road rest stop 15 km before Seymour I spoke to Tim while charging up. He’s a cycling enthusiast from St. Kilda in Melbourne but was in a car with a friend on this occasion. His companion even gave me a delicious fresh apple.
There were no regular accommodation options available at Tallarook (the local pub – shut) or Broadford (2 hotels and a Motel – all booked out), However, using WikiCamps again I ended up wild-camping behind the Broadford Bowls Club. The main Sydney-Melbourne railway line was just 100m or so away from my tent and trains came roaring through every half-hour or so, but I got used to it and had a good night’s sleep anyway. Two guys in two camper-utes came after dark and settled-in close to me but they were fine too.
Day 10. Thursday 13 May 2021. Broadford to Abbotsford |92 km; 617m of climbing|
I stayed on the Hume Highway as far as Craigieburn (53 km), then took the Galada-Tamboore pathway to Thomastown (17 km) and finally the Merri Creek and Capital City Trails (16 km and 6 km) to home.
I even tucked into a McDonald’s muffin breakfast at the huge multi-restaurant BP truck stop at Wallan – that’s a first! Some hopeful had placed a New Testament under my load strap on the bike while I was having brekky, but I neatly placed it on the bin and so remain un-converted. If the sneaky book perp had been around I’d have given it back to him instead, though I do suspect it may have been the Indian-looking gentleman grinning at me through the KFC window as I got back on the bike in a ‘we-love-all-mankind’ sort of way and chanting ‘go on, take it you bastard’ under his breath. Sorry bud.
The Hume Highway stint was becoming a little dangerous towards Craigieburn as the traffic built up, the shoulder narrowed and it’s condition deteriorated, mainly due the amount of rubbish in it.
I’ve been on the Galada pathway many times (though never in this direction). The bicycle flyover of the M80 is now complete and so the horrible road diversion with its attendant 4 km on busy Mahoney’s Road is now a thing of the past. In fact, on this day’s ride I was effectively on separated bike-only lanes or shared pedestrian-cyclist paths for the whole way.
Melbourne CBD through the telephoto lens. Only 50 km to go.
And the weather forecast was spot-on too – steady rain started an hour after I got back home and didn’t stop for 3 days.
[The snow did eventually arrive in the ‘High Country’ too, just a couple of days later than predicted, and the roads I’d been travelling on were closed for the season 2 days after I passed through VicRoads Alerts ].
– ends –