Yikes! The end of November (2021) already and I’ve only ridden 1,300 km in the past 6 months since my last multi-day trip in early May #86 Crossing the Great Divide. I can mostly blame the latest COVID 19 lockdown for this (we did just achieve the world’s record for duration of lockdown, after all – 262 days. Well done Victoria!) But it was also my own fault because after the lockdown finally ended on 20 October, I promptly managed to fall off the bike and hurt myself. That fall resulted in a painful rib injury (a costochondral separation it’s called) and a twisted left knee (resulting in patellofemoral pain syndrome 😑), and it took me 8 weeks to recover enough before attempting another longish cycling trip.
So this post is about me getting back in the saddle after a long lockdown and a painful crash. It was a fairly leisurely amble from Melbourne down to Geelong via the back roads on the western side of the Bay, a short ferry-ride across the bay entrance and a couple of days camping on the eastern foreshore before finally a long quick ride back home to Melbourne along the eastern coastline of the Bay.
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Monday 29 November 2021. Melbourne to Geelong |117 km|
[A warmish day – 22°C rising to 24°C; clear, with zero to 20% cloud cover and back again to zero throughout the day, and a slight cooling breeze from the south-east. A flat ride on dedicated bike paths and back country roads, mostly bitumen surface with a couple of kilometers of compacted gravel].
The Capital City and Federation Trails took me 35 km from home to the outer western Melbourne suburb of Werribee. These trails are ok I guess, but the scenery is quite boring – think light-industrial with a lot of shabby shipping container marshalling yards.
But soon after Werribee, and still heading west away from the bay towards the quaint-sounding You Yangs, you’re suddenly ‘out bush’.
Don’t make the same mistake I did if you come along this way by bicycle. I just blindly followed my GPS into the brand new residential subdivision of Harpley. Well, there’s half-a-dozen exit roads from Harpley marked on the map – any one of which should’ve taken me on towards Geelong – except that none of those roads actually exist yet. They’re ‘future roads’.
My Bosch Nyon GPS unit got very confused at this point at my continual refusal to accept its recalculated routes, and finally just threw its arms up and said “Well buddy, you’re on your own now”, and promptly shut down its tracking function and refused to cooperate for the rest of the trip. So, in spite of what your GPS might be telling you, just take the Galvin Road exit off Bulban Road at the roundabout and save yourself a 10-km unnecessary detour.
To be honest here’s not much between Harpley and Lara either (unless you’re particularly interested in volcanic scoria, which is in abundance), although you do pass through the village of Little River if you’re in need of an expensive cold drink (which I wasn’t).
But from Lara, it’s more interesting. Lara itself has a Subway and an Ampol Service station if you’re hungry and thirsty (and probably a lot more besides that I didn’t check out). I bought a half-sub and replenished my (cold) water supply at Subway, and then was straightaway onto the very pleasant Hovells Creek Trail all the way into Geelong.
Mangrove wetlands along Hovells Creek, looking east
Looking back west along Hovells Creek towards the You Yangs
Black swans in Limeburners Bay
After pristine Limeburners Bay with its black swans you’re then straight onto Corio Bay with its heavy industry. But it’s a surprisingly nice ride along here too. They’ve gone to a bit of trouble to beautify the landscape and create a ‘proper’ bike path along the foreshore, and there’s some interesting art installations and murals to look at along the way.
I was quite chuffed with myself (it means ‘pleased with myself’ if you’re not used to Australian english vernacular) after the day’s ride. Even though it was flat enough, I did have a moderate load on board – with all the camping and cooking gear, clothing and bike tools and chargers etc., – and yet still managed to achieve a putative range of 200+ km for the day (ie. 90 km still left in the batteries after 117 km travelled). This is a good thing because it meant I’d only used the power assistance sparingly, which indicates my damaged left knee might finally be ok now.
In Geelong, I stayed overnight at the showgrounds for $25, which is cheap enough these days I suppose, but the facilities were fairly crap and the pitch itself a bit ordinary. Dinner was a hearty shaved lamb kebab from the nearest souvlaki shop (1.5 km away), plus 4 cans of bourbon and coke from the bottle shop (1.5 km away in the other direction).
I didnt get much sleep – the officious admin lady had plonked me right next to the toilet block and the glare of its full-strength fluorescent lights was directly into my tent all night. Actually, I had gotten off to sleep quite early on, but was rudely awakened at 12.30 by a very loud and very strange noise. This turned out to be from an industrial-scale automatic sprinkler on the other side of the galvanised iron fence I was camped up against. The sprinkler was one of a ring of them watering a horse-racing track next door, but the one nearest me had been poorly sited: once every revolution it blasted a high-pressure water jet directly onto the tin fence for a few seconds. It sounded like a wake-up rattle from a kettle-drum, and it took me some considerable time to work out what was actually going on.
The sprinklers timed out after an hour, but by then further sleep was impossible anyway due to the aforementioned lighting that had turned the interior of my tent into a flood-lit stage. Placing my COVID mask over my eyes and snuggling down into my sleeping bag eventually allowed me to get some rest, but then at 6.30 am the horses started training and I had the regular thundering of hooves to contend with.
It seems Geelong showground is home for several troupes of travelling circuses – whether this is usually the case or just because of COVID I couldn’t say. The circus folk were all ensconced up one end of the showgrounds and us few travellers were put well away from them down the other end. We travellers consisted of half a dozen caravanners and campervanners plus me, the only cyclist (ok then, e-cyclist). None of them were all that friendly, though one of the neighbours did come over in the morning as I was packing up to deliver a lengthy dissertation on the government and its handling of the coronavirus, and protesters, anti-vaxxers etc. I listened politely and made a few neutral comments so as to avoid inciting him should my perceived views differ from his. He seemed to hold some anti-aboriginal sentiment that I was not keen to explore, but anyway he eventually did leave me alone without provoking an argument.
Tuesday 30 November 2021. Geelong to Queenscliff |78 km|
[Hotter today – high 20s. No wind at all until the last 5 km into Queenscliff. No clouds; plenty of sunscreen, long trousers and long sleeves were the order of the day. Road surface was about 40% compacted gravel and the rest bitumen].
I wasn’t in any particular hurry, but still got away early from the Geelong showgrounds – it’s amazing how galloping horses and a belligerent neighbour can get you up and hurry you along. So, as soon as the sun was high enough to dry off the tent from the heavy overnight dew, I was packed up and away at 8.30. The Bellarine Rail Trail is easy to find and easy to follow. In fact, it runs right past the showgrounds on the northern side (Carr Street, C112).
The Bellarine Trail itself is about 40 km long. You’re on the old rail bed for the first half, to Drysdale, then you’re on a side track – the railway itself still operates as a tourist steam train for day-trippers between Drysdale and Queenscliff(e). [Funny that: it seems the Borough of Queenscliffe is spelt with a posh-looking ‘e‘ on the end, but the town not]. It’s all pretty flat but the last half has a couple of steep gullies to cross. I didn’t meet any traffic at all in the first section, but after Drysdale there were some hikers and herds of kids out for their school cycling excursions.
From the end of the Rail Trail at Queenscliff station, I continued on to the working fishing port itself, and around to the ferry terminal to check out their prices and schedule. Two ferries do the run, and leave each hour on the hour from both ends (ie. Queenscliff and Sorrento) from 7 am to 6 pm. So a one-way trip takes around 40 minutes and costs $15 with the bike, and there’s no need to pre-book.
Oh bugger! It looks like I must have over-written all the pictures I took in and around Queenscliff on this day. The town of Queenscliff is a quiet backwater compared to its far richer cousins on the opposite headland entrance guarding Port Phillip Bay, and even compared to the burgeoning tourist mecca of Port Lonsdale just a little further along the Bellarine coast towards Barwon Heads and Torquay, but it has retained a certain rustic charm reminiscent of the bygone era when it was an important port of entry into Australia during the goldrush days of the late 1800s.
I spent a bit of time going backwards and forwards along the ocean-side shore of the Bellarine Peninsula as far as Barwon Heads looking for any available campsite but the campgrounds – that are all run by the local councils – weren’t yet open for the season, probably because of compliance with still-lingering COVID rules, I guess. They’d been shut down for two summers already and weren’t in a hurry to re-open.
But eventually someone put me onto the ‘hiding-in-plain-sight’ caravan park of Queenscliff Recreation Park that I’d missed twice already, tucked-in, as it is, behind the non-descript Bowls Club and Sports Ground, but just across from the lighthouse that signals “The Rip” approach channel and entrance into Port Phillip Bay. And it was really very good, too. Highly recommended. The camp kitchen is superb (I was the only user, too), and the other facilities and proximity to the beach and to the town’s shopping precinct made it ideal for the travelling cyclist. I even went for a lazy swim in the protected natural pool at the beach just below the “White Lighthouse”, and watched the flotilla of small fishing boats drift-fishing as the rip ran out of the bay, and the frequent large cargo ships lining up and running into the bay.
An added attraction of the Queenscliff Recreation Park is the restaurant in the Bowls Club next door that is subsidised by the poker machine revenue that the club rakes in. I enjoyed a sublime Seafood Marinara, but it was a quiet night. There was only myself and one other diner, plus a couple of down-and-outs robotically feeding their cash into the poker machines so I doubt the pokies income would’ve covered the six or so indolent and lazy wait- and bar-staff hanging about. One to take your order, one to pour the beer (No drinks ordering from the tables), one to bring the food and another to take away the plates plus kitchen-staff. But full marks to the chef anyway – my seafood marinara really was that good.
Wednesday 1 December 2021. Queenscliff to Blairgowrie Beach |12 km|
The rain that threatened yesterday and half-heartedly tried to fall last night looked more ominous today and a stiff change was in the air (and over the internet). Still, I unhurriedly packed up and dawdled over to the ferry wharf for the 40-minute trip over to Sorrento. It fascinated me how the cross-headland ferry traffic negotiates the constant convoy of commercial shipping entering and leaving the Bay. Again, no pictures to mark the occasion as they were among those lost off the SD card somehow or other.
Once over on the other side of the heads I quickly spotted a camping ground booking office near the ferry terminal in Sorrento. The 30-odd km along the bay shore of the Mornington Peninsula from Portsea to Dromana is basically all campground, but it is highly regulated and very seasonal, and hardly any sections were open yet due to the local councils still vacillating about whether to call an end to the COVID lockdown. Anyway I was lucky that a section nearby at Cameron’s Bight and close to the Blairgowrie Pier, was open as of that day, 1st December, so I grabbed a spot for 2 days. It turned out to be fantastic.
The long-portended storm, when it did arrive late afternoon, did not disappoint. The main brunt of the wild weather missed me, with localised storm cells from the south-west passing to both the north and the south of my position. This afforded me a grandstand view of the theatrics, complete with thunder and lightning and swirling cloud formations that lasted for about an hour and dropped a deluge…somewhere else, but not on me anyway!
The storms passed through and the evening sun came out. Later on, Justine and family came over (they live nearby, only about 2km from where I was camped) and we had a nice picnic on the beach.
Thursday 2 December 2021. Blairgowrie Beach | no travel |
Smatterings of rain throughout the night were not a problem in my cosy little tent and next morning everything dried out nicely.
The weather wasn’t ideal – a bit too windy on the beach. I spent the day doing uncharacteristic things, such as just relaxing, and nipped over to the local shops without any specific purpose in mind. My daughter Justine and her tribe made an early afternoon appearance and we all went for a swim and had fish and chips down by the pier.
Friday 3 December 2021. Blairgowrie Beach to Melbourne |111 km|
Things didn’t quite go according to plan here. Another ordinary day at the beach, at least half a day, then I packed up and moved over to Justine’s house, since it was her birthday and we’d planned on a celebratory meal out then back to hers for drinks and I’d stay over instead of stumbling back to my tent. Dinner went well, at a Greek-style restaurant near Rosebud Pier but on the back there was a silly argument, and since I was all packed up anyway I decided to just hop on the bike and go home – stupid really, since it was already 10.00 pm and ‘home’ was at least 5 hours away. Still, I did it and arrived back at my place at 3.00am after a furious night’s riding, not proud to say. The weather, at least, was kind and the roads were quiet.
– ends –
