One Week Out

One Week Out

 

We arrive in Melbourne 9:40 AM on Wednesday June 22. David has reserved our first night’s accommodations in Torquay, a coastal village south of Melbourne, one of Australia’s premier surfing locales. Torquay is at the Eastern end of the Great Ocean Road on which we will start our ride follow west for several days.

These last few weeks have found me attending to a multitude of small but vital details in preparation for our ride….

Getting this website and journal up and running again has occupied a significant portion of this time. The look has been changed, the archive of the Journal from our 2012 trip had to have the images reloaded when the links to them were somehow lost when the new theme was activated. Not complicated, but a time consuming task. I anticipate having new ‘travelers’ follow this journey and felt having our 2012 trip journal available was something they would appreciate. Thanks goes out to Dave Plemmons for helping me work through some of the website issues.

Preparation of the bikes and all of our cycling gear is essential. Going over just about ever nut, bolt, and cable involves a great deal of patience and an attention to detail. Along with the work on the bikes are test rides that provide training opportunities as well as the opportunity to listen to the bikes for telltale signs of possible issues. Not only is the preparation of our bikes important, but also honing my skills as a mechanic for these instruments that will carry us across the vast distances that lie ahead. I am hopeful that I’ve wisely invested in that “ounce” of prevention.

In addition to all the mechanical maintenance has been preparing the bikes for transport. Qantas Airlines has a very bike friendly policy, which allows bikes to be boxed and checked as one of two checked pieces. They provide generous dimension that allow us to disassemble our recumbents to fit into the boxes I have been working to construct. Thanks goes out to Peter Davis and Champaign Cycle for the generous supply of used bike boxes I have recycled and repurposed. By the end of the week I was able to box both Joe’s bike as well as his trailer. I have a couple training rides early in the week before our departure.  My bike will be boxed by Tuesday evening.

Between David and myself, we have already been planning the first few days on the road. Charlie Smyth from Urbana cycled the Great Ocean Road in December 2014 and provided some helpful information as well as a nicely detailed map for that portion of the trip. I was able to order additional maps for South Australia and the Northern Territory online and they arrived this week. I have contacted hosts belonging to the Warm Showers organization to see who might be available to host us for a night. Warm Showers is a cyclist only version of “Couch Surfing” or maybe even more familiar, Airbnb but without any costs, more simply, just cyclists hosting cyclists. While very prevalent in the U.S., membership is growing worldwide. There are quite a few hosts along our route, even several in the outback town of Alice Springs.

We got quite a bit completed this past week with more details needing to be covered in the days to come, overall things seem to be coming together.