Posts From Australia

Today is a prep day; the goal - collect the rental bike Todd is going to ride (a brand new BMW R1250RT) and go for a test ride to help our US visitor get his first taste of riding on the left hand side of the road and taking round-abouts clockwise.

NLTI ? - Notorious Left Turn Indicator. You see I am riding a bike that is a very old design and amongst its charming features are the absense of "turn indicator cancellation" and the absense of a fuel gauge. The first of these features mean that I constantly forget to cancel my turn indicator and it seems that this happens mostly on left turns. Todd seems to have taken on the role of "my wife" in regard to this topic and now reminds me whenever needed.

A pleasant morning getting a small taste of Mudgee wines in the form of a short tour of 3 vineyards. The first visit of the day was to Robert Stein's where in addition to some nice wine we got a chance to visit their museum of antique motorcycles. Thereafter we got a chance to checkout Petersons and Bunnamagoo.

Recent rains in NSW closed the route we had originally planned for today (which was via Gilgandra, Walgett to Lightning Ridge) so an alternative was required. The alternative turned out to be a much longer ride, some 700 km, and just to add insult to injury the rains returned to make the first half of the day a wet ride. However after lunch the weather gods smiled upon us and we had a great ride, in sunny weather and on empty roads from Moree to Lightning Ridge.

A very fast-paced day. We started with two mine tours; the first the "walk in mine" kept around to show tourists like us without any climbing of ladders. Later in the morning we got to ride the "man-lift" down 65 feet into our hosts actual working mine.

There was a little bit of uncertainty about today. Our plan was to leave Lightning Ridge on the road that was closed to us a couple of days ago. We made this decision after discussion with our LR hosts most of whom had driven that same road in their 4x4 trucks on their way to LR on Friday and assured us that the water was only 200mm or 8 inches deep.

As the reader can see from the previous blog entry we stayed last night in the little NSW town of Gilgandra. An interesting little town that is somewhat sadly still living on the notoriety of The Cooee March, an event that happened in Oct-Nov of 1915. To read more about this event click here

We noticed last night that the Kandos Hotel was under new management. The guy servicing at the bar was the new owner (of only 2 weeks he told us) and we noticed some things that highlighted this fact.

The riding is over, so its time to become just plain tourists. Todd spent the morning cleaning the dead insects off the rental bike and returning it to the rental company. The afternoon Nina acted as tourist guide with a visit to the heart of Sydney, and a ferry ride to Manly beach.

Todays activity was a bushwalk (hike) into the nearby National Park. Again Nina was the guide on this 2+ hour stroll on a somewhat rough, mostly down hill, track. Weather was cloudy and the bush was wet from recent rain. That probably explained the leeches that found Nina to be an enticing meal. See the last photo.

Today was the final chance for our visitor to see those elusive animals that Australia has to offer the world. Kangaroos, Cassowary, Echidna, and Koala to name just a few. Fortunately these days there is a very compact zoo in the center of Sydney that makes most of these aniimals easily accessible.