TravellingStrom

A bit of a sleep in as there was no rush this morning. The bakery served a great bacon and egg roll for breakfast and I wondered up to the Railway around 9.30am. I entered my bike into the ‘most unique biker outfit’ category in tonight’s presentation and had to list all the farkles I had added, which took a while 🙂 Then there was a riders briefing for this morning’s road ride. I had heard about yesterdays dirt ride and a few people had fallen off going through creek crossings, so I decided to play it safe and just do the twistys. That is our ride leader with the beard.

First stop was a lookout over a valley.

There was some discussion here about seeing some snow, as we could see it up high on some of the peaks. It was warming up although I still had on all my layers and we were now changing the plan from going to Falls Creek and now heading up to Mount Hotham which is a ski resort. There was lots of tight twistys and it was very enjoyable. They had had a fire here a few years back and some of the trees have never recovered, but were not allowed to be removed because the greenies reckon they will be homes for animals.

We were quite high now and the views were great, but we still had a ways to go. The road now had orange snow poles on the side, obviously for the winter time, there were signs advising stay to the right of the poles.

I also took a video going up this section, one handed until I saw a very sharpcorner and shut it down.

And we came to a great place to stop with a large amount of snow to be seen, very cold stuff and I am only used to this inside a glass with rum and coke in it 🙂 See, I told you it was cold down here, now you can believe me 🙂

We stopped at the resort to grab a snack and a coffee etc before heading back to town.

It was a great ride and very relaxing for the most part, a few hairy times coming around corners with oncoming traffic livened things up though. We got back around 3.30pm where I had to explain my entry to the judges for my bike, basically just show them what had been done. My compressor got a work out as one of the other riders on a Tiger changed his tyre and only had a hand pump. It worked well and had enough guts to pop the bead onto the rim, but he had a tube so that helped.

Then back up the Railway there was a Spyder that was being used as a test ride, a few of the other chaps tried it but I had ridden one in Townsville and had already had a few beers, so decided against it this time.

Then the dirt riders came back from their ride, it was unfortunate they overlapped otherwise people could have done both. Oh dear, Vstrom down!

He had done a low speed drop and sheared the clutch lever right off at the base. It uses a hydraulic clutch and the lever is very thin and weak. I had a broken brake lever in my tank bag, just the end broken off and after a bit of banging and fiddling, the lever was installed and it worked like a charm. So, it is good to know, they are interchangeable, you just need to swap the inner bits around.
By the time that got done, it was after 6pm so it was straight into the dinner room, although there was a bit of a line up to start with.

Here are the ticket sellers; they also did all the backup work and registrations etc.

The presentations went off rather well and guess what, I won the most unique prize and had to read out all the modifications I had done, which took a while also 🙂 I have another addition to strap to the bike now.

The raffles were done, this is Alf doing the spruik, although I bought a heap of tickets, I did not win anything, but no worries, all proceeds go to the RFDS.

Another Queenslander took out the oldest bike category with a 1975 Kawasaki, so we had a few beers together before staggering back to the hotel after midnight, quite sloshed 🙂

Day – 207km
Trip – 19,45km

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