ride4acure

Wow what a fantastic day. I woke up at 5am after a night of being awake every couple of hours. I’d just wake up think about what I’m doing, then talk myself back to sleep. This happened all night! We camped at Haley Barnes home with her partner Matt near Laurieton. Haley is an old friend from Moparrabah/Warbro area who is now living in the Hastings. Many years ago Haley was part of an upriver gang of kids who with my crew of kids used to get to the bus stop at McKenzies Creek just after 6am and we’d light a campfire and cook sausages for breaky on bits of wire and wrap them in fresh white bread (I know what your thinking but mmmm did they taste good??)and hook in before the bus came! The bus used to leave at 7.10am (and we had to drive 9kms from the farm to get to the bus!) and the kids loved it. The bus trip in those days was the best part of their day as they got to hang out with their mates for an hour and a half!

Back to the bike ride eh…I got going from camp at 6.30am and rode the 4 kms back out to the Pacific Highway then hooked along at great speed! I had a lovely soft tailwind, ideal temperature, light traffic and the sweetest road surface to ride on …I was flying. Made great time to Taree and met up with Esther and Joe at morning tea and had a coffee at Macca’s on the Purfleet side of Taree. Also met a lovely woman Lesley and her daughter who had heard of ride4acure in the ABCRA (rodeo and campdraft magazine article) and again were shocked that Hannah had died from melanoma. Hannah’s story highlights to people that melanoma can strike anyone and that is everyone’s business. I had heaps of ‘toots’ and waves today off truckies, who I have to say, in my limited experience, are so respectful of cyclists.

Everday I hear stories of young people dying from melanoma. A year ago I only knew of one! It is like the genie is out of the bottle.

Back to the day. I rode out of Taree to the Lakes Way turn into Tuncurry and it would have to be the ‘deadest’ rode to ride a bike on, I thought my tyres were flat, brakes on etc…the surface was terrible, rough, bumpy, some short, steep hills, no shoulder to ride on…and I had 20 kms of it. Took me an hour and a half to get into Tuncurry, then another half an hour to find the crew as they had rang earlier and told me they were by the water and  I knew Joe was off fishing and Ez was on the phone (thus I couldn’t contact her to find where they were parked!) I rode around for half an hour -thirsty, hungry looking for the ‘rig’, eventually finding them and we had lunch by the water and headed off to Tuncurry Primary to meet up with about 100 Year 1 & 2 students. What a fantastic group of students and teachers. We were very welcome and the kids really engaged with the message and asked heaps of great questions. And again Tuncurry Primary will be doing some fundraising for ride4acure. 

Staying with a ‘horse mate’ of mine, Hannah’s & Esther’s, Fiona Murray in Tuncurry (that rhymes!) and today have a morning tea function in town and am hopefully meeting the mayor of Tuncurry ‘Jan’. Then I get an afternoon off and will catch up on some other stuff like washing my bike, oiling the chain, pumping tyres. And gas bagging with Fiona as she’s a long distance cyclist with a fair bit of knowhow about bikes. I am a complete novice having a crack at a long  distance ride for the first time and learning as I’m going! Fiona has earlier this year completed a trip across Cape York on her bike!

I swap drivers today as Esther has to go back to work in Wagga Wagga (after delivering a horse and a pup to a drover out at Quambone near Warren), my eldest sister Yoni will be driving for the next week. I’m swapping drivers each week, however my main man Joe is with me for the long haul! He is the caravan whizz and has packing up and setting up down to a T and finding fishing holes! Joe’s find of the week is some spray on prawn scent he’s trying out on his ‘fake bait’ things.  Ez and Joe have had a couple of ‘trying’ moments where they wanted to ‘throttle’ each other (as only brothers and sisters can and get over it 2 minutes later), but it’s all grist for the mill.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 5:54 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.