Day: 118
Date: Tuesday, 27 October 2020
Start: Narrandera
Finish: Harden
Daily Kilometres: 194 (click for Julie's Strava and photos)
Total Kilometres: 12562
Weather: Cold early then mild, partly cloudy and windy with some rain during the afternoon
Accommodation: Motel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Egg & bacon rolls
Lunch: Pie & chocolate cookies/Chicken salad roll & chocolate cookie
Dinner: Chicken parmagiana & vegetables/Southern style chicken & vegetables, apple pie & custard
Aches: Nothing significant
Highlight: Beautiful bucolic scenery as we cycled up onto the south-western slopes of New South Wales
Lowlight: The headwind made what was already going to be a testing day even tougher. We were travelling eastwards for most of the day and, from about 8am, we were riding directly into a headwind of about 30kph, gusting higher in places.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We made another early start, leaving at 4:45am, and initially cycled north-east along the Newell Highway, the main route between Melbourne and Brisbane. This meant that we encountered quite a few trucks, but at night they are rarely a problem, with us seeing them, and them seeing us, from a long way off. The weather forecast included headwinds and showers, so we were pleased it wasn't raining when we left, after the travails of yesterday, and the wind wasn't too bad.
After about an hour we left the Newell Highway and headed eastwards on the much less busy Canola Way as dawn broke. It was very pleasant, with the road following a freight railway line and passing through a number of small grain towns, each with silos in the railyards. Most of the towns had clearly seen better days, with lovely old, but derelict, buildings, though a few were still doing well and we stopped at one, Coolamon, around 8am and bought breakfast, which we ate in a small town park. In one of the small hamlets, our passing stirred up two dogs, one quite large, who chased along inside their yard barking loudly at us. This was fine until they reached the end of their yard and both hurdled the fence and pursued us on the road. I did a lot of yelling and made a couple of aggressive swerves to deter the biggest from getting too close. Fortunately, he didn't seem too nast, and in the end, gave up the chase.
After breakfast, we continued eastwards on the Canola Way, with the headwind much stronger, and a few climbs thrown in for good measure. However, the countryside was beautiful with a variety of crops and some grazing land on rolling hills. Everything looked very green and productive.
We took a mid-morning break on the northern outskirts of historic Junee, having completed 100km of our 190km for the day, but we were slower than hoped, primarily due to the wind, but also the climbs. It was busier as we joined the Olympic Highway and we had to ride on the narrow road edge, which was rough tar, for safety. The scenery remained beautiful, despite the continuing climbs, as we soldiered on to the large regional town of Cootamundra, where we had a very late lunch in a bakery around 3pm. Again, we had hoped to be earlier, but the wind and hills meant we were barely averaging 15kph for long periods.
The last 40km was more hills as we climbed to our highest elevations for the day in the Great Dividing Range (according to Julie's watch, we climbed 1375 metres today). We had one somewhat amusing episode on this section when we encountered roadworks on a steep uphill, and we kept the single lane closed for an extra long time as we laboured up the hill when it came to our time to go. By this stage our legs were very tired and we were not in the mood to go faster than a comfortable pace. They could wait!
Around 6pm, we finally reached Harden (at the top of another long hill, of course), and stopped in at the town supermarket to buy our microwavable dinner, before continuing on a short distance to our booked motel. We checked in, having our temperature taken for the first time on the trip. I thought we might have been over-heated, given all the hard climbing, but we passed OK. We quickly showered, ate and went to bed, knowing we had another challenging day tomorrow.
The reason we are doing long hard days this week is that, having decided to head for home, I worked out a schedule that would get us home this coming Friday afternoon. There is an event we would like to attend on Saturday, and now some other commitments have been planned for the weekend. My schedule for the five days of this week was challenging, but doable, but we hadn't reckoned on the unusual weather pattern which has brought strong headwinds, cold weather and a lot of rain (a year's worth in two days in some places) to the eastern states. It has added a degree of difficulty to our last week of cycling. However, we are up to the challenge and today, which was likely to be the toughest, is now done. We have a sense of accomplishment, but know the next two days will also be testing.
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