Just as you said, Andre --
First ride in five months!
We reached the Gold Coast of SE Queensland a week ago, for our more-or-less annual visit to our son and his family. Early this week, I had recovered sufficiently from a bad case of jet lag (flying for 28-plus hours will do that) to allow me to unpack and reassemble my bike.
All went well, with neither bike nor box having suffered from 4 airports, a train ride, and umpteen thousand kilometres. An unexpected Senior’s Moment interrupted the usual reassembly in reverse order, however. I removed the wheels from the box and set them aside, installed the seat post and saddle, loosely installed the handlebars, perched the frame across the corner of the box so that I could install fenders and wheels, and said, “Now where are my hub skewers?” I had pedals, pump, tool kit, seat and handlebar bags, and frame bag, but no hub skewers. Oi, sez I, this isn’t good. Could I have left them in the small box in my workshop which held the tubes and old skewers I use for rear triangle and front forks when the bike is travelling? Seems unlikely, but…
So I rang a bike shop in Southport, near the flat where we’re staying, to see if they had a pair of Halowheel skewers or something similar. Sam, who answered the phone, said he didn’t have the Halowheel items, but he did have a pair of anti-theft skewers which would work. I hiked over to the shop, met up with Sam, bought his skewers, and—enjoyed a 15-minute chat with him about the several years he had spent living in Kelowna, in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. He loved the landscape, he said, and especially the dramatic change of seasons, between the blistering heat of summer and the snowy mountains of winter. He had even learned the standard Canajan mantras: “But it’s a dry cold.” (Or heat, when it’s in the high 30’s.)
Anti-theft skewers in hand, I hiked back to the flat, and resumed my work with the frame. I took my steel water bottles out of their cages, and lo!—one was heavier than the other, because it contained my hub skewers, carefully wrapped in a paper towel and inserted into the bottle so that they wouldn’t roll about in the packing box. Turned out that it was a good idea at the time, and remains so—but I needed the trip to the LBS as a workaround for my Senior’s Moment. I felt like a bit of a chump, but enjoyed my chat with Sam about Kelowna.
Over the following couple of days, I made my first rides in five months—just 50-plus kms in all, a short ride and a longer one to check that everything was working as it should, reacquaint myself with handling roundabouts while riding on the left, and get used to the fact that the sun isn’t where I’m used to seeing it.
We’ve just passed the autumnal equinox Down Unda, so although the days are still warm (26-30°) and fairly humid, the sun isn’t nearly as fierce as it is in January and February. That suits this member of The Spotted Tribe just fine, thank you very much.
For my first ride since last October, I made a brief run out to the end of “The Spit”, a 5-km sliver of land which runs more or less south-to-north, shielding the estuary of the Nerang River from the ocean. The Spit is made up of sand dunes, covered with grasses, bushes and a few copses of pine trees. Most of it is a small national park, with the ocean beach on the east and a quiet beach and lagoon to the west. It’s a favourite spot for hikers, cyclists (along the road on the lagoon side), surfers, scuba divers and fishers. It’s also under threat from Development (posh hotels and condos at the town end, dredging for coal freighters at the seaward end). For the moment, a stalemate holds, and a cyclist can easily do a there-and-back in half an hour or so; longer if you decide to pause for a gelato and espresso.
The day was sunny, with a slight haze—the first two photos below show the bridge over the Nerang River, with the towers of Surfers Paradise in the background, and a a moorage on a quiet inlet on the inner side of the Spit.
The following day, I made a slightly longer ride—just 40 kms or so there and back--southwards along the oceanfront to Burleigh Heads, where the Tallebudgera Creek enters the sea. The Burleigh waterfront is a busy place, with a steady stream of road cyclists, surfers, and walkers, and I wanted to revisit a favourite café.
Just north of Burleigh Heads, I stopped at the Espresso Café, which I like so much. A few steps from its patio, the beach is interrupted by a bluff, and beyond that, curves south and east towards Coolangatta on the New South Wales border. (See photo #3 below.)
In Burleigh Heads proper, the standard view of surf and beach northwards up the coast towards Surfers Paradise and the Spit, on this day included a couple of ‘Strayans at their play – see #4 below.
Tallebudgera Creek flows eastwards from the low range of mountains a few kms inland from the Gold Coast. In photo #5, these are visible through a slight haze. On a later ride, they will form the backdrop as the route follows Tally Creek (as it’s called) inland 20 kms or so. (Bizarre detail in the photo: that is a 40- km/h sign you see in the estuary. 40 km/h!! Jaysus, Mary an’ Joseph—I should have thought that sign would read “Dead Slow”, the sub-text being, “No wake at all, d’ye hear?”)
A very different ride from my last one, northwest of Ottawa in mid-October 2018—much gentler, with just one short-but-not-so-steep hill, and a whole lot warmer ☺
More to come, from both the more northerly parts of the Coast, and from its southerly and more inland (and hillier!) districts.
