Creswick to Adelaide
We were going to Creswick for a friend's significant birthday, so I decided to ride back to Adelaide afterwards. Last time I took the coast road home from Creswick, this time I went up through the inland route. It's about 750 kilometres and I decided to see if I could do it as a non-stop trip, knowing I had only an outside chance of doing this.
It is change of seasons here in Australia, so I was expecting a large diurnal temperature range. (I measured 0 to 34 degrees.) This makes travelling with a very light kit unwise; I couldn't quite manage with only a bivvie and sleeping bag tucked up to the side of the bike with a couple of octopus straps, and with water strapped to the other side. Eventually I settled on my Topeak MTX Trunkbag which also has small side panniers. That allowed me to carry a little cold night clothing, and the three litres of extra water which I thought necessary to safely ride overnight.
On a bright sunny morning, all the hills around Creswick were shrouded in fog. Only 3 degrees here, despite the sun. This is Mt Bolton.
Creswick is just north of Ballarat, so the logical car route is to use the Western Highway and then the Duke’s Highway in South Australia. I would be passed by 10 gazillion cars on that road, so I took the Sunraysia Highway to Donald, (B220) and then backroads to Walpeup (c247). I then took the Mallee Highway (B12) to Lameroo and the B55 via Karoonda onto Mannum and, finally, Adelaide.
Time stopped is as costly as the time it takes to ride on a trip like this. At St Arnaud, my real average speed was 18.2 over 128km, which is a good fast touring speed. By the time I left (fill bidons, eat pastie, duck into a shop and buy a tube of glue—no waiting anywhere, that average was down to 17.7. The pattern continued for the whole trip.
At 350km, I rebooted the GPS, as Wahoos have a reputation for crashing out with high kilometres. At that point I was still holding 17.7, unsurprising given that from St. Arnaud until then, I had been on dead flat country. I slowly lost speed heading north through the old sand dunes on the edge of the Big Desert and then across to Murrayville.
The body held up really well on this trip. I passed my previous best distance of 580km just short of Karoonda, but a few kilometres out of Mannum I began to notice one of my “tells” for unsafe riding. Despite earlier caffeine gels, I kept drifting to the right, and centring on the road. A 1.00am on a country road that doesn’t even rate a highway number this might not seem much of a problem. For me, what it indicates is that I am losing concentration and going to sleep, even though I don’t feel sleepy. Sometimes, noticing it is enough, but this time I could not stop the drift. It meant I was slowly going to sleep and instinctively veering away from the edge of the road.
I stopped and bought food at Mannum, PICTURE topped up the water, and headed out to Palmer. I felt a lot better for the stop, but was clearly still sleepy, and the timing meant I would now be on a busy road for the morning Hill’s rush hour, so I made use of Palmer’s little camping spot and grabbed a full 1.5 hour sleep cycle. It was too cold to simply sleep on the concrete, so the time taken to unpack sleeping gear well and truly put paid to anything like my 48 hour hopes.
The new day brought very strong winds in the Adelaide Hills, and I limped home after a slow breakfast at Palmer.
The Palmer Hill is one of the easier climbs from the east into the Adelaide Hills, although it's not a climb that you ever take lightly given that it is much busier than it used to be. After breakfast, I began to realise just how important it is to be able to balance the bike at low speed. On these hills cars are at their worst behaviour. They seem to think that they can squeeze past the slow bicycle in a way that none of them do on the open highways! I do not understand the psychology of this; for stupidity, it’s on a par with the way cars speed up when it rains in Adelaide. As the cyclist I have a drop off the bitumen on one side, into all kinds of rubbish and trash, and a large vehicle sometimes doing the full 110 kilometres an hour 6 or 8 inches to my right. It means a wobble could be fatal. What I had noticed the night before, along with the drift, was that my balance was a bit off. So that's another tell to add to the list of things which indicate that it's time to stop riding and have a good sleep.
At Palmer, I’d brought up 685km in 46.2 hours. The total when I reached home was 748km.
Andrea (October 2023)
