Day: 115
Date: Saturday, 24 October 2020
Start: Balranald
Finish: Hay
Daily Kilometres: 132 (click for Julie's Strava and photos)
Total Kilometres: 12194
Weather: Mild, raining early and overcast
Accommodation: Motel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Curried egg & lettuce sandwich/Chicken & cheese sandwich
Lunch: Lamb Yiros
Dinner: Chicken & chorizo paella, ice cream
Aches: Nothing significant
Highlight: The last hour of riding, flying along with a tailwind, outrunning the heavy dark rain cloud we could see looming behind us, and knowing we would have an early finish followed by a day off was exhilarating.
Lowlight: The first hour of riding after leaving the motel at 5:40am was pretty miserable. Darkness, steady rain, endless puddles and a mild headwind all conspired to make us think we might have been better to stay in bed.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
Although we had a relatively short day in prospect, just 132km to Hay, we decided we would still get up at 5am and aim to get to Hay in time for lunch there. There had been long periods of steady rain during the night, and it was raining as we prepared to leave. A quick check of the weather radar indicated that the rain was likely to last for a couple of hours, then clear. We gave momentary consideration to postponing our departure until the rain stopped but, having woken early, we just wanted to get going.
We pedalled out of town on the very wet road and were soon in total darkness as we crossed the Murrumbidgee River. Our route for the next four hundred kilometres will follow the river upstream, though we will only see it occasionally. We can remember fording it near its source in Kosciusko National Park eighteen months ago when we were hiking the Australian Alps Walking Track.
It was quite miserable riding early on (see above), and we weren't expecting to be dealing with a headwind, but as the cloud-covered sky lightened, so did our mood. There was very little traffic, just a few eighteen-wheelers in the first hour, so we could choose our line on the road to minimise puddle spray. The country was flat and treeless, the southern fringe of the Hay Plains, claimed to be one of the flattest places on earth. Julie's Strava record for the day shows our elevation stayed between 70 and 90 metres above sea level for almost the entire 132km journey. The humidity had cleared with the rain, so we could see a long way to the horizon, which seemed to emphasise how low were the clouds, in all shades of grey, covering the skies. You almost felt like you could reach up and touch them.
Traffic had increased, and we tensed and gritted our teeth for the cold shower we were blasted with whenever an eighteen-wheeler passed by (in either direction), but the rain held off and the wind gradually swung behind us, making the last half of our journey quite pleasant. We only took two breaks, at 64km and 103km, both at picnic shelters in windswept highway rest areas, so made good time for the day and soon after noon we were crossing the Murrumbidgee again, this time into the town of Hay, a regional centre.
Our motel kindly let us check in early, and we quickly showered and walked up to the town bakery, getting there just before it closed, and bought some lunch which we ate back at the motel. There followed shopping and laundry, microwaved dinner, and then watching the AFL Grand Final (= Superbowl) on TV where, sadly, my team lost.
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