TravellingStrom

I woke up after a freezing cold night, well what can you expect for down here, but I was sure not expecting it after the hot day yesterday. Oh well, it’s a nice place for a visit and all that 🙂

So, I headed off around 8.45, I am to meet Emmjay at his place in the south of the city. I vaguely remembered some roads I should have taken, but in the end I just followed the TomTom and of course I arrived on time.

A few others turned up and we had six all up to start with, for some reason they put the short arse in the front

Now, they had planned this ride to cover most of the ranges all on bitumen this time, so we headed off around 10am. Choccolocca could not participate, apparently he fell off the missus and hurt his back, well, he hurt it doing domestic duties, so same thing really 🙂 A couple of action shots of the days bike ride.

The first stop was the old Orrerell tracking station that had been dismantled. The hills around Canberra were ideal for these stations as they shielded the receptors from stray radiation as they were situated in valleys. These are all radio dishes, not optical, and were used widely during the cold war and the early space race. Dave even brought morning tea or coffee for everyone, thanks m8 🙂

Where the actual dish was that helped in the moon landing is a memorial spire with a styalised moon on top and some info for the public. This is the Honeysuckle site from memory, I could be wrong though.

Then of course some arsehole has removed the answer to the next question, now how will I sleep at night?

Then we headed off on some more windy roads, until we got to the lake that supplies the city, the day was still cold and I had all my gear on, except for this photo 🙂

We kept on going until we got to Tidbinbilla.

We had some lunch and looked around the museum that was there, it was a very interesting place to visit.

This stuff was interesting, apparently you can make in the home, not sure how, but I can supply the 99.8% air I am sure 🙂

When we left we headed through some of the country that had been severely destroyed back 5 years ago in bushfires, a lot of trees never recovered and were bulldozed over. Unlike the ones on Mt Hotham which have been left standing, that was on October 11th while I was at the AGM. Up at the optical telescope site, most of these buildings were gone and you can see the devastation inside, although the outside has been cleaned up.

Then as the day was getting on a bit, it was now around 4pm, we headed to Mt Black and went for a look up the Telecom tower, there was some nice views.

The we went for a beer, the only ones left are Emmjay and Dave, so they came back to the caravan park I was staying at down at Eagle Hawk, this was 12km west of Canberra and actually in NSW, not the ACT as I would have expected 🙂 There was this weird hire car there just leaving, we had a few ales but not many.

The wind started to come up something fierce and it was getting very cold, so when I got back to the campsite I had to add some weight to stop the tent flying away!

It was 6pm and down to 10C already so lucky I had some shelter and some warming fluid, I watched a few shows on the lappy and had a quietish night while feeding the local wildlife on beer nuts, one of my staple diets 🙂

I just have to thank those who came along for the ride today and of course Emmjay for organising it, thanks a million, it was worth coming back for 🙂

Day – 269km
Trip – 28,298km

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