Category

Riding

Category

I made it home. Today I rode a lot of my favourite roads. New to me was the highway from Mudgee to Lithgow, but from there I took the Jenolan Caves Rd, Duckmaloi Rd, Shooters Hill, and Abercrombie. Stopped in Goulburn for a cup of tea with mum, then slabbed straight up the highway. I took some photos of the stunning views on the way, but I just can’t get any depth of field on my phone, and they all look like I’ve taken photos of grass next to the road. Read on “The Big North: Day 7 (home!)”

Planning the trip home is hard.  I have to avoid my natural inclination just to head home, and instead keep exploring. It’s also hard as I want to go inland and the distances between towns are huge – it’s harder to make adjustments than on the coast where things are close together.  I’m also a bit sore & don’t want to over-commit & have to ride long distances while tired. Read on “The Big North: Day 5”

I’m going on a motorbike ride. And I’m going to write about it. I haven’t done this for ages (the writing about it part, that is – I’ve done plenty of riding).

The back story is that I’m not working at the moment, don’t want to ride in January as it’s crazy-busy (and crazy-expensive), hopefully will have work in February/March and am likely to move in April. So now is the very best time for a ride. And the week before Christmas is actually fairly inexpensive as everyone starts their travel the week after.

But I needed a goal – Read on “The Big North: Day -4”

It’s been far too hot to ride recently – around 37°C for the entire week (and it starts getting hot too early to get a ride in).

I did get out on one great ride on the Australia Day holiday – about 11 of us spent a few hours on the back roads before settling in for a burger at Jugiong. That was fun – after saying I could probably manage 80 on gravel roads, I managed a top speed of 112 before it got a bit wobbly (my top speed on tarmac is only 124). But most importantly, I Read on “Seat, tyres and boots”

After re-discovering how much I like adventure riding, the next step was to get my bike and gear set up much better.

R and I had talked about how I could improve my skills and confidence. The initial plan was to put knobby tyres on the BMW and lighten my load. But then he made a very obvious suggestion – instead of setting up my big, heavy bike, I should start riding my small, light bike. After all, I do own a Yamaha WR250R, and I did buy it to improve my off-road skills. It’s a great bike – it’s Read on “Preparing for the next trip: Bike & gear”

The back story

There’s a bit of a back story to this ride, and it’s kind of important as context.

Last year I fell off my motorbike – I was riding fire trails with friends, went over an erosion mound, landed front tyre first in a puddle, lost the front end and went for a slide. I didn’t break anything, but because I landed heavily on my shoulder, stretched a bunch of stuff out, and couldn’t move my arm easily for a while. Worse than the damage to my arm was the damage to my confidence – I had been Read on “Victoria high country adventure ride”

I just spent most of the last 5 days on my butt, riding my motorbike, along some of south-east Australia’s very best riding roads.

It started with a friend saying ‘I’m riding to Tassie – anyone welcome’. I locked it away in my calendar, and am very glad I did, as I know that otherwise I would have just continued to work.

I had no plan except to follow him to Melbourne, visit my dad in Seymour, and come home over 2-3 days. Somehow.

I wasn’t sure where I’d stay, so I thought it would be handy to take the Read on “Two Snowies ride”