A quick trip to the bakery
Day One - Jamestown
Farina is an old railway siding on the original Ghan line to Alice Springs. It's about 600km north of our house, and a group of volunteers have restored the old underground bakery which is near the station homestead. It seemed like a good ride; what's not to like about a bakery. :)
I was feeling a bit undercooked after some illness, so Day One was a deliberate test for whether the ride would proceed. It was a 214km stretch to Jamestown, which is a great launchpad for going further north. The immediate challenge on this day is the ride out of Adelaide. Highway One is suicidal. All roads have a "personality" and the road from Gawler to Tarlee (Main North Road) is also unpleasantly busy, and feels bike-unfriendly. It is one of the few places I expect oncoming traffic to overtake in my lane, forcing me off the road! But there is a workaround which costs only 8km.
I live near the Northeast Road – Sudholz Road intersection. It means I can take back streets and bike paths to Mawson Lakes, and around the Parafield and Edinburgh airfields, to the relatively quiet Andrews Road out west from Elizabeth. This road delivers me via a couple of dog-legs up to Wingate Road and on to Wasleys. There is a short section of unsealed road, but nothing unpleasant. From Wasleys the route goes through Hamley Bridge and Stockport, hitting Main North Road a few hundred metres south of Tarlee. For that extra 8km you get about 5% of the MNR traffic, and it always seems a more free flowing ride.
The personality of Main North Road changes dramatically (for the better) at Tarlee, but I tend to go off the bitumen and use Old Main Road South to get to Riverton.
The surface is always good and, this time, glass smooth. There is one important caveat: Avoid it if there is the least likelihood of rain. On a previous ride, after two minutes rain on this surface (I am not kidding,) I had so much gunk in my drive train that the chain was slipping on the cassette.
The apparent detour to Riverton, which is off the direct route to Clare, funnels cyclists onto the Rattler and Riesling trails, which are a good (unsealed) surface with no traffic for almost 50km, and no grades beyond the old railway 3%. It always seems a no-brainer to me.
Clare has a 24 hour OTR, the road north from Clare to Jamestown is always well behaved towards cyclists, and usually doesn't have too much traffic. So hitting the main road at Clare works well.
This trip was in mid-July, so it was predictably cold. There had been a gentle 10km head wind all day, which dropped with the dusk, and was replaced by serious windchill. It was 0 Celsius at 6.30pm, and by Spalding, it was -1C. For the rest of the trip to Jamestown, I was left peering over my glasses because they were permanently fogged over.
My favourite stop-off at Jamestown is the Railway Hotel. The always cheerful Shelley's motel units have a couple of really good things going for them. Firstly, there is room to lean a bike against the wall without shifting anything or blocking access to the benches. And, even better, the air conditioners blow across the room into the wardrobe so that you have a small, very warm drying room, if it's been raining, or if you wash your clothes. They are always happy to leave a key out for you, and they leave the full compliment of towels in the room even though it's only one person coming. This makes it easy to roll up and "blot dry" anything you wash.
Stats: 216.8km, 12 hours moving at 18.1kmh, Real Average Speed: 16.2kmh, Min Temp: -4C
