Day: 103
Date: Monday, 12 October 2020
Start: Auburn
Finish: Adelaide
Daily Kilometres: 110 (click for Julie's Strava and photos)
Total Kilometres: 10780
Weather: Cool early, then warm and mostly overcast
Accommodation: Apartment
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Egg & bacon roll
Lunch: Honey chicken & rice/Pad Thai
Dinner: Nachos, apple crumble & ice cream
Aches: Nothing significant
Highlight: Reaching Adelaide, another milestone on our journey.
Lowlight: We encountered more traffic lights on our ride into Adelaide this morning than we have seen in total in the last three months, and most of them were red. It seemed that almost every light was green as we approached from about 400 metres away, and nine out of ten turned red just before we reached them.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We had promised the bike shop in Adelaide, where we had arranged to have our bikes serviced, that we would get them there as early today as possible because they had a heavy schedule. With 110km to travel, we thought delivering them around lunchtime was possible if we didn't mess around. We didn't want to start too early, because the road into Adelaide was likely to be Monday morning busy and cycle-unfriendly, making riding in the dark risky. So, we left soon after 6am as the sky was lightening, with the goal of first riding 60km to a truckstop for breakfast.
The sunrise was again beautiful with the clouds glowing pink and creating some beautiful tree silhouettes on the horizon. To the west, the first rays turned the trees on the top of the hill the shades of autumn while the fields below remained dark. Very special.
There was an increasing amount of traffic and we spent a lot of our time checking our rear-view mirrors. A few large trucks gave us warning horn blasts when oncoming traffic gave them little room to move over, and we spent some time in the dirt. One highlight occurred when we came upon a wallaby in the grass verge between the road and a fence. It was startled by my arrival and took off along the fence looking for an opening and travelling at the same speed as I was riding. For a time we were travelling together just a few metres apart, but then it found a hole under the fence and was gone.
Although Google showed our ride for the day was gradually downhill, that's not the way it seemed. We had a number of long gradual climbs that sapped our energy despite assistance from a following breeze. Around 9am, we reached the truckstop and bought some breakfast which we ate sitting on a kerb in the adjacent carwash. Soon after, as we continued south, we passed through the large town of Gawler and from that point on were mainly riding through suburbia on the Main North Road into Adelaide. There was a lot of traffic (and traffic lights), but it wasn't too bad and we made good time, arriving at the Torrens River on the northern edge of the city at 11:30am.
We needed to get our bikes to the bike shop as quickly as possible and suspected we were too early to check in to our booked apartment, so we stopped at a toilet block and did a quick change out of our cycling gear then rode a kilometre to the apartment block hoping we could leave our bags in storage there while we took our bikes to the shop which was nearby. As it turned out, they let us check in at noon, so we dropped our bags in the apartment and delivered the bikes by 12:30pm, satisfied we had done our best.
After leaving the bikes, we walked a kilometre to the Rundle Mall, Adelaide's main shopping strip, and found a food court for lunch. Afterwards, we did some supermarket shopping with the intent of using the apartment cooking facilities to cook our meals for the next couple of nights (for a change), and then returned to the apartment.
Later we cooked dinner and relaxed enjoying the excellent view we have over the city to the south and east.
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