Author Topic: RIDES 2017 — add yours here  (Read 84567 times)

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #60 on: February 18, 2017, 12:13:52 pm »
Super photos, Matt, esp the brilliant Scottish winter sky. Below, there are a few from Oz which don't even come close.

My wife and I visited Culloden Field in 2008, and I thought that the account of the conflict presented by the Visitor Centre was very well done. I was reminded that James Wolfe was 2nd-in-Command to Cumberland; I've often wondered what might have happened had the French shown up as the Jacobite forces thought/hoped/understood they would...Would the Battle of Québec in 1759 have turned out differently?--Wolfe's army was victorious there, in the decisive battle in North America in the Seven Years' War, 1756-63.

Anyway, back to more immediate matters of day rides, in this case, checking in from Down Unda: 

We reached the Gold Coast of SE Queensland just over ten days ago, and my bike arrived unaffected by the 21 hours of flying it took to get here. (I brought my derailleur bike, mainly because it's a bit lighter and more compact than my Raven.) For my part, I had a bad dose of jetlag, which morphed into a monster head cold which laid me out for a couple of days. Still, I’ve managed a few day rides along the coast, both north from the Southport area where the kids live, and south towards Burleigh heads and Coolangatta, the latter just on the Queensland/New South Wales border. My rides have been short-ish, 3 – 4 hours including a sampling of the numerous excellent cafés of the GC. These have been exploratory day rides, to acquaint myself with routes, traffic, and the heat, and to renew acquaintances with my cycling muscles since I took my bikes off the road in mid-November in Ottawa.

The rides have been an enjoyable intro to cycling Down Unda. The Coast has an excellent network of cycle paths and cycles lanes on roads, and a handy set of printed and online maps and guides. I’m not unfamiliar with the area, as we’ve visited our son and his family several times, but this is the first time I’ve cycled here. I had been a bit unsure about both the traffic and the heat-and-humidity. As it turned out, both have been quite manageable. (One of the few beneficial side effects of my monster head cold was that its worst period coincided with a heat wave, with daytime highs around 39-40, with 80% humidity. I slept through most of it in an air-conditioned room.) The drivers have generally been accommodating and alert—it helps that there are both dedicated bike paths and fairly spacious cycling lanes on arterial roads. (I’ve avoided the busiest of the latter.)  The heat is a challenge, the humidity more so.  I start my rides early-ish, so as to finish before noon, and keep myself well hydrated.

Below are a few photos (broken into three separate posts) taken on a ride from Southport to Burleigh Heads on Feb 14. Valentine’s Day was humid, with a high overcast. and a stiff wind from the SE. The beach photos are thus not approved by the Australian Tourist Board, as the scenery lacks the stereotypical brilliant sun, the arc of a high blue sky, a sea with at least half-a-dozen shades of aquamarine, and sand an almost blinding golden-white. There’s a remarkable string of waterside parks in the 60 kms or so I rode from north to south and back again, and these include an array of sculpture, the pieces ranging from the whimsical to the graceful and reflective. I’ve included a few which caught my eye, along with a nice pedestrian/cycling bridge across an inlet, and a charming mural on a public loo.

As I work into a more regular routine of riding 3-4 times a week, I’m going to extend my rides to 90 kms and beyond. There’s an intriguing ride of about 55-60 kms to Murwillumbah, a small country town in northern NSW, which will make for a day ride of 6-7 hours. That will be more demanding than the coastal routes, as the route runs south-west inland from the coast, a gentle climb along a river valley, and then a steep section up, over and down the remains of the caldera of an ancient volcano. Happily, the steepest parts of the route are also forested. And, there’s an A-grade café in Murwillumbah. Hope to do this ride sometime during the last week of Feb., and will send a short account with a map, as well as photos which meet ATB weather requirements.

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #61 on: February 18, 2017, 12:20:10 pm »
Some more photos of roadside/pathside structures in the Gold Coast:

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #62 on: February 18, 2017, 12:25:59 pm »
...and finally, the required landscapes, these a bit understated, rather than the standard-issue blazing colours:

jags

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #63 on: February 18, 2017, 02:37:50 pm »
skyscrapers on the beach thats mad.

RST Scout

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #64 on: February 18, 2017, 03:42:11 pm »
I thought it was supposed to be summer down there? That beach scene looks just like our beach, today at Formby UK - overcast. Nice loo btw.
Scout & Bettina's slave!

Andre Jute

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #65 on: February 18, 2017, 09:23:29 pm »
Super photographs, John, especially the bridge and the landscapes.

skyscrapers on the beach thats mad.

I rather like it as a solution attractive for both egalitarian and environmental reasons: everybody gets a sea view and a bit of beachfront, and there's no unsightly urban sprawl. Tidy, that. 

rualexander

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #66 on: February 19, 2017, 10:06:50 pm »
Strange sight in central Scotland today

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #67 on: April 03, 2017, 06:44:41 am »
Rual, those are Scottish fridges, surely?

Hay bales with attitude?

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #68 on: April 03, 2017, 07:00:39 am »
More from Down Unda – SE Queensland’s Gold Coast and its hinterland

Signing off now for a week or ten days, as we reload and reorganize the wagons for the long trek back to Ottawa. April 6 will be a long weird day – we reach Vancouver at 7:30 AM, some 3 hours on the clock before leaving Sydney.

Over the past couple of weeks, though, I’ve done several longer day rides, 6-8 hours or so. One took me north of the Gold Coast proper [GC, to the locals], away from the ‘burbs and into cane fields and small fishing villages. I rode with a couple of cyclists I’ve come to know here. They were on trick plastic bikes, so I had to work quite a bit harder than on my solo rides. (No bad thing.)

Beyond the beauty of the quiet countryside, this ride showed me the gritty side of cycling in these parts. Danny, our leader, has a slick 2 x 11 Shimano drive train. Slick, that is, at the beginning of each ride. There’s so much sand thrown up from the roads, he said, that he has to wipe down his chain & sprockets after every ride, and clean and re-lube after every rain. Otherwise, he said, he’d replace his chain and cassette at least every year, at $400 a pop. (On my abacus, that’s a Rohloff every three years or so.) In a similar but less costly vein, I reckon I’ve spent more time cleaning my chain in the last six weeks than I would in a full season’s riding in Eastern Ontario.

Early last week I made my most enjoyable and demanding rides in my time here, south and west from the coast into the Queensland/New South Wales border ranges.  Several rivers cut through the 50 or so north-south kilometres of the Gold Coast, running east into the Coral Sea. They tumble down the eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range, and over the ages have cut deep valleys. The heights are not great, perhaps 700-800 metres at most (next to the Pre-Cambrian shield, these are some of the oldest rocks on earth) but the hills are steep and the  valleys and ridges are lush with pastureland and rainforest.

My longest ride was about 115 kms, a round trip from Southport (towards the northern end of the GC) to Murwillumbah, a small agricultural centre in NSW, some 25 kms inland on the Tweed River. Between my starting point and my turnaround at the New Leaf Café (a highly recommended eatery on the attractive old main street), the road climbs and descends the forested caldera of a huge ancient volcano. It’s the back road to Murwillumbah, known as the Tomewin Mountain Road, and a favourite for cyclists because it’s narrow and twisty, with a 60 kmh speed limit and light motor traffic.

Here’s the Google altitude profile: http://tinyurl.com/kuzoq3m 

The North-to-South section is a bit easier than the return leg. There’s a stiff short early climb, about a km in the 14-16% range, followed by about 10 kms of more-up-than-down as the road snakes along the volcanic rim through eucalyptus and then rainforest. The scent is sublime, the birdsong a symphony all its own, and the views are pretty good too – see below, #s 16, 17, & 18.

Shortly after crossing the border, the road descends the inner side of the caldera. The ancient volcano was a big ‘un, not merely an old ‘un: about 100 kms in diameter, and some 23 millions years old. My photos give only a sense of the scale of the north-eastern portion of the basin – see #19 and 20 in this post and the following. Further south and west is the eroded plug of the volcano, Mt Warning. The first part of Australia to be touched by the rising sun, it’s sacred to the country’s indigenous people, and more recently was used and named by James Cook as a key navigational aid.

(continues in the next post) (having problems posting photos -- to be resumed)
« Last Edit: November 12, 2017, 03:58:03 pm by John Saxby »

Andre Jute

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #69 on: April 03, 2017, 08:01:01 am »
Old Canadian wisdom: always leave them wanting more! Super clear piece of work, John. Panting for photos to match.

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #70 on: April 03, 2017, 10:39:20 am »
You're too kind, Andre.

That said, when I saw the old QLD farmhouses, despite their being seriously gentrified, I thought, "Straight outta the platteland, with a wee bit more vegetation around the edges! Andre will love these!"

Now let me see if I can get the photos to migrate to their proper place 'neath the text...

Done! Here's the first batch, linked to the text above:  #16, 17, 18 & 19.

Remainder of the text and photos follow immediately in a separate post.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2017, 11:05:12 am by John Saxby »

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #71 on: April 03, 2017, 11:08:45 am »
Concluding text and photos from rides in the Gold Coast hinterland/NSW border ranges:

The return journey northwards from Murwillumbah and up the the inside slope of the caldera is more of a slog, a steady 6-km climb of about 15%. Although most of the climb is shaded, I found it very hard work, and stopped a couple of times to catch my breath, drink some water, gather my wits, and admire the view.  I also started thinking about lower gears next time, if I want to take the Tomewin Road to Murwillumbah. My lowest gear on my Eclipse gives me 20.6 gear-inches, while 3rd on my Raven is 19.8, and 1st is 15.4.  Changing to a 22T small ring on the Eclipse would give me 18.6. Mmmmaybe…or maybe I’ll just bring the Raven and have done with it. (There is a longer and less hilly route closer to the Tweed Valley, and that includes a view of Mt Warning too.)

The Big Scenery aside, this ride offers some smaller roadside pleasures as well—old rural Queensland architecture and splashes of tropical colour: see #s 14, 15, & 21.

Some additional notes:

>   I made my ride to and from Murwillumbah on March 28. I had done a training ride on the Tomewin Road a few days earlier, and that included a pretty good downpour. My salmon Koolstops handled the 1 km x 15% descent very well, and that was A Good Thing, as the descent ends about 50 m before a T-junction, and beyond the T-junction is a steep drop into the Currumbin River.

>   Two days after my ride, however, northern NSW received 400mm of rain in 24 hours, as the tag end of Cyclone Debbie hit the area, some 1000 kms south of its landfall north of Brisbane. Jaysus, I thought, doing the arithmetic in my addled head, that really is 16 inches of rain in a day. This is biblical. For whatever reason, the Gold Coast caught only another heavy downpour – it appears to occupy a zone of comparative tranquility, between the more fierce weather systems to the North and South.

>   The GC region has a very good network of bike paths and bike lanes on roads, better than anywhere I’ve visited outside Europe. To my pleasant surprise, I found most drivers to be considerate, giving me space even on the narrow and twisty roads of the hinterland. Cyclists I spoke with confirmed my impression, and said that there’s been something of a sea change in the last 10 years or so—many more cyclists, more bike shops, a progressive approach by the regional council, and a growing cycling culture as a result. There’s a good online and printed guide to cycling in the Gold Coast, and when I get back home I’ll send the Council a thank-you note for their good work.

>   This part of Oz has a good supply of very good cafés, most of them independently owned and operated, and offering good coffee and (frequently) racks for bikes. I used my lock (a TiGr-Lock Mini) several times, mostly because I’ve agreed to do a review of the lock. It worked just fine, but I probably didn’t need it. (Though I wasn’t about to test that.)

All for now. My People tell me that spring has come to Ottawa after the strangest of winters, so I'll look forward to riding around the rivers and the canal, and into the hills.  Photos from that side will be pretty pale by comparison...

Matt2matt2002

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #72 on: April 03, 2017, 06:12:28 pm »
Spring tour
Starting my Spring tour today.
I bike and bussed up to Inverness from Aberdeen.
Tomorrow I cycle to Fort William. Wednesday down to Oban for the 13.30 ferry to Castlebay and begin a ride North through the Outer Hebredes.
I hopped off the bus 18 miles before Inverness and the head winds were aweful. Hopefully the High Pressure area due to arrive in a few days will calm things down.
Those 18 miles felt like 28.
Fort William is 70 miles away so I'll take it easy ready for the 44 mile dash to the Oban ferry on Wednesday.
Anyone been this way?
I did Harris and Lewis 2 years ago but never been to the Southern parts of the Hebredes.
Matt
Never drink and drive. You may hit a bump  and spill your drink

Andre Jute

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #73 on: April 03, 2017, 09:58:54 pm »
John! Loved the curved corrugated iron roof over the veranda! It's impossible to explain to people who live in mild or cold climes how essential a deep veranda is to civilization in the places once settled by pale Englishmen (these days we would say "Britishers" but back then Englishmen included the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish, especially the Anglo-Irish). Where I grew up, St John Palace, Oudtshoorn, we had Italian tiles instead of corrugated iron (it was the most ostentatiously tasteful house (1) for three hundred miles around when it was built in the Ostrich Feather Craze of Victorian times); the veranda, which ran all the way around the house, was fully fourteen feet deep.

You can just imagine the raw, disturbed earth under the greenery of your photographs. It always comes as a surprise, even to people with African and more southernly and westerly Australian experience, precisely how hilly the inland strip from the East coast and especially the Northeastern corner of Australia can be. Queensland is the new California; let's hope it is isn't ruined by the same stupidities of uncontrolled immigration, incompetent, politically correct administration, and a smug, hypocritical elite protected behind huge income differentials. I'm delighted to hear cycling is taking off in Queensland (thanks in no small measure to Sam, another Thorn forum member who's a real stirrer).

(1) Italian scholars came all the way from Italy to study the mosaics, imported from Italy and assembled in place (they were newly made back then, some new designs, some copies of mosaics in Roman villas, not ripped-out ancient mosaics) by imported Italian craftsmen. The scholars had been tipped off by Italians who were prisoners of war in the area in WW2, engineers who designed and built some of the fabulous roads, married local girls and stayed on after the war.

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #74 on: April 03, 2017, 11:39:55 pm »
Thanks, Andre -- glad you liked the houses. I've attached one more, #13, which for some reason wouldn't 'take' in the earlier post. And, it seems, won't take on this post either, even though I've now tried three times, and it's only 363KB I'll take the liberty of sending this to you in a PM, Andre, as it doesn't change the thread of the cycling story in any way.

Some of those old rural houses in Southern Africa are remarkable in their beauty. In many respects, these show some of the same climatic considerations, especially the need for shade and cross-ventilation. #14 also shows a chimney (!!??)  My son says that the Gold Coast has had one day of frost in the past 50 years, so maybe that chimney was installed when the house was built. back in the day...Similarly quaint devices can be seen in Durban.

Old QLD verandas often have nice decorative cast-iron fretwork bracing the vertical poles and the outer horizontal beam of the veranda roof.  I was at some distance when I took these photos, and didn't use the telephoto, but #13 below shows some of that detail. (Although as I look at it more closely now, I realize that on this house, the braces are wooden. #15 has the cast-iron items.)

Hard to know how the future of the Coast will play out. On one hand, there are some of the positive signs that I've seen, from a cyclist's viewpoint. On the other, there's a lot of opportunistic money going into what I think are very dubious projects: there seems to be a big push under way for huge casino/all-inclusive luxury resorts, with a couple identified for both Brisbane and Main Beach here in the GC. Some of the money behind these proposals is foreign, some of it local (e.g., Kerry Packer's son). Casinos are presented as injections of capital which galvanize local neighbourhoods through their ripple effects. (Las Vegas is often used as the example; Atlantic City, not so much.) (My response is, "Oh? Suggest you read Hunter S Thompson.") So often, the reality is Big Expensive Bubbles. People visit those places and stay indoors, gambling. Sometimes the ripple effect is simply more addiction among the local population.

A friend in Brizzie said the other day, "I don't want my city to become the Macau of Australia."

'Nuff of the rant for now -- there'll be other opportunities, I'm sure, as The problem isn't going away :-((

Back to my cycling story proper.  There's one key note I forgot to add:  In this corner of Australia, there's a lot of broken glass on the roads in the "urban" areas. I couldn't be sure of its origin--beer bottles would be my guess, but also broken car windows. In any case, I had more flats in my few hundred kms of riding here (three) than I would in a couple of years in Ontario. That included two in one day, about a km apart :-(  [Silver lining: I was fixing my tire in a parking lot near a small park, and was immediately surrounded by about twenty-five curious 4- and 5-year-olds, part of a daycare class on a walk. I felt like Gulliver amidst the Lilliputians.]

I had to replace one of my Schwalbe Marathon Racers, the one I was using on the front wheel. It was the more worn of the two, as I had been using it on the rear wheel. It suffered three cuts through the tread. The only close replacement I could find was a Bontrager 700 x 32 semi-slick. That has worked very well, and is very close to an exact size match for the 700 x 35 Racer, as that is only 32mm when inflated.

Considerations for my next trip to QLD thus include (i) more suitable gearing for the hills; and (ii) attention to tires, maybe including a backup.