Day 4: Wudina to Adelaide
Day 4 was by far the hardest day of the trip, while we only had 500 odd kilometers to travel, as apposed to the previous days 700+, the temperature started at 30°C and went up from there. Eventually it reached between 43°C and 45°C at various points along the day’s travel.
Needless to say the days focus was purely on staying hydrated and making it to Adelaide rather than taking photos (it was much cooler and comfortable while moving rather than stopped).
One thing I do remember about the day is coming around a bend, seeing a wind farm on the small hill we where riding along side and thinking “oh crap, the cross wind here is just gonna suck”. I was right.
Day 5: Adelaide to Portland
Not much really to say about this days riding, nice easy no cross winds, pleasant mid 30s temperature. All in all a very nice break from the previous day.
In Portland we went for a drive around town to see if any of the houses my great-grandfather lived in where still standing. Turns out one of them probably is but its been renovated and expended so much that it’s hard to tell.
We did take several photos of some of the older places to see if any are still recognisable to my grandmother.
Day 6: Portland to Port Melbourne
It was immediately obvious the previous day when we crossed from South Australia into Victoria, the quality of the road surface dropped dramatically and the number of signs extolling how much VicRoads is spending and how tired you must be driving on all the ‘remote country roads’ sky rocketed.
Frankly if VicRoads spent half as much on actually maintaining the bloody roads as they did on signs, in one 1km stretch we had 5 sets of signs telling us that the speed limit was 80km/h, the roads might come up to the quality of the worst roads in any other state. Seriously the dirt tracks giving access to the lookouts over the Great Australian Bite, 200km from any sort of civilisation let alone an actual town, where smoother and safer to ride on than National Highway 1 in Victoria.
Originally we’d planned to ride the Great Ocean Road between Portland and Port Melbourne, however because of availability of bookings on the Ferry we where unable to take a planned rest day in Adelaide. This meant that by the time we’d gotten to the Great Ocean Road we’d been riding for 5 days straight, one of which was truly brutal. Figuring we where all to tired and thus wouldn’t really get the most out of riding the Great Ocean Road we decided to skip it for now, catch it on the return leg and just ride through to the Port.
Any way despite the roads we made it to Port Melbourne in plenty of time to load up the bikes onto the trailer, get on the Spirit of Tasmania II and head across.
Of course it couldn’t simply be that simple. I got rather sea sick and Karen managed to fall and sprain her ankle. Which meant I had a rather terrible night and she was gonna have a rather less interesting week than planned. No bike riding for her.
