Bathurst was not an amazing experience, tbh—the place I
stayed was perfectly clean and I couldn’t fault the room at all but the
ambiance and the neighborhood had me…well, this is the first place I’ve stayed where
I shoved the doorstop under the door before I went to bed. It was just creepy. It probably didn’t help that
this motel had three buildings and I was in Block B: a bit too close to Cell
Block B, dontcha think? Also there were no lights in the hallways. :(
I corresponded with Michael briefly yesterday morning, and I
was practically bursting with pride to tell him how well I’ve been doing with
my fear of heights situation. I made sure to say that I was still slow and
cautious on those kinds of roads, lest he think I was getting to be more like him
than still like me, but I felt unreasonably pleased to be able to let him know
I am officially Not Going to Refuse Roads, with the exception of unnecessary
roads such as going to the top of Mount Washington—there is NO reason why I can’t
wait at the bottom with a book as it is COMPLETELY unnecessary to go up there
on a motorcycle or, frankly, on an anything. I am sure there are a multitude of
ways I can continue to be a thorn in Michael’s side, but refusing roads will no
longer be one of them. !!
I got out of Bathurst without even bothering with coffee and
took the A32, also called the Great Western Highway, okay, to a place called either
Wallerawang or Marrangaroo, I am clearly not sure which, where I stopped for
gas and a McDonald’s coffee. I was ready this time for Mickey D’s to have a
barista situation going on, with a separate counter from the food side, again
with the macaroons and toasties on offer; I was NOT ready to discover that in
Australia, McDonald’s apparently abbreviates as “Macca’s” and I am 50/50 that I
know how they pronounce that. I found this out because that is the name of the wifi
network, so it’s official, and geez Australia—way to be extra Australian.
I held the door for a gentleman on my way out of “Macca’s” and
since I was wearing my riding suit it wasn’t a big surprise when he said “I don’t
suppose that’s your BMW there, is it?” Thus began a discussion of roads, and
when I said I was headed to the Putty, he did that swoony thing and said “Ah,
now that’s a rider’s road.” He repeated
that phrase a couple more times in our conversation because sometimes that is
the only thing you can say about a road. The Putty was a nice road, though a
little uneven in terms of sometimes being through a neighborhood and sometimes
completely remote and truly a rider’s road; I will say that B59, Bell’s Line Road,
which I took from the A32 to get to the Putty was arguably a much more
interesting road—lots of sheer drops and tight turns and noooooo margin for
error. Overall, the Putty was way easier of a ride, which had me thinking about
how different riders like different kinds of roads. For me, Long Meadow Road
and the Pepacton Reservoir parts of Route 30 are my favorite kinds of roads:
lots of big sweeping turns, not too many straights, but still allowing for
decent speed. I like those big sweepers because there’s always the moment where
I feel like ooooooooooooh shit and
the only thing I can do is lean over more, stay on the throttle, and that, to
me, is living.
A rider such as, say, Michael might prefer roads such as
Frost Valley, which is a tricksy road made up almost entirely of unpredictable quick,
blind, turns, which could either tighten or not as they go, and, just for kicks,
there is sometimes gravel in the middle of the road in a corner. Mike often
ends up a mile or more ahead of me on that road, and if it’s 30 miles bottom to
top he probably stops to make sure my headlight shows up three to four times at
least. I asked him once if he ever gets that yikes feeling and he said yeah,
sometimes, mostly in a turn marked with those fluorescent arrows. The fluorescent
arrow turns, huh, Michael? I think he was throwing me a bone. Now is perhaps a good
time to mention Michael was a professional race car driver and how that man has
put up with my high-level freak outs about various turns and roads and gas and weather
is pretty much all the confirmation anyone should need that I am extremely fun
to hang out with and/or one of the few people he knows who shares his
preference to ride hard. (A fair number of people have gone on rides with us once and never again—they always love the roads Mike knows but apparently they also enjoy
things like ‘stopping.’)
So overall the Bell’s Line Road was more challenging, but
the Putty was also lovely, and I passed through some truly beautiful landscapes
with spectacular views and rugged mountains and rolling hills and if you are
expecting pictures of any of that, no. There were no stopping points—no shoulders,
no scenic look outs—because apparently these are just normal roads.
I stopped off at The Grey Gum International (!) Café which
is along the Putty because this cafe gets mentioned on lots of the reports of
the Top [X] Motorcycle Roads in Australia—the Putty always high on the list—and
it’s super MC friendly (there were kiosks designed specifically for riders to
clean off their face shields, complete with spray and towels!). I was, however,
the only bike there—that’s another reason I am glad to have the luxury of
staying off the popular MC roads on the weekends. (TONS of “motorcycle caution”
and “Motorcycle Safety Police Enforcement” signs on the Putty; I am guessing people
go up there and do dumb shit on the regular.) The Grey Gum has a whole parade area for MC-only parking.
There was a nice couple heading to the (car) parking lot as I
walked up and they struck up a conversation and during the course of that I
realized they were taking the Putty so as to avoid the “highway.” The Putty. An
infamous road with dozens of warning signs, a fair number of switchbacks (to be
fair, they were pretty much always generous in terms of widening the lanes),
big descents and inclines and more and that was, for them, better than the M1
or whatever. The M1, I hasten to add, is a perfectly reasonable two-lane road sometimes
marked at 100 kph and sometimes goes all the way up to 110, which is, get ready: 68 mph. So
yeah. They chose the switchbacks. The Putty is a normal road.
I ended up in conversation with these nice people for a
while, and they asked the inevitable: where are you going? I did the usual—I don’t
know, smile, shrug—and then asked them for recommendations along the coast north of Sydney.
The gentleman said, “If this were up to me,” and then weirdly I took his
advice, and now I’m in a place called Karuah. I’m at the Karuah Motor Inn and
it is impeccable, and the owners are lovely—the lady checked me in and gave me the download on the area while the
gentleman appeared out of nowhere in a Norton t-shirt and invited me to put the
bike under the portico, where, he said, all the bikes park. (I am sorry to
report, Mark the Friendly Motorcycle Guy the Australian Edition, that if it
does rain, as is predicted, the good news is that the bike will be out of the weather
while the bad news is that the crust of bugs all over everything will also be
out of the weather. I hope the guys at the garage have a hell of a power
washer.)
Karuah has, apparently, three options for dinner: I was
given a card that would give me member’s pricing at the Returned and Services League,
or RSL, and then informed that there is a fish and chips shop as well but it’s
closed so my other option would be the BP. That is, the gas station. And she
said this so easily, like you can go to a restaurant or to a gas station for
dinner, have a great night!
I went to the RSL and it was lovely. Everyone was so friendly and I kept being called “love” and
I ordered two appetizers and ended up with food enough for a week, all for $25
AUD. I would promise to go back except I don’t have to promise—I will be back
tomorrow night as this joint is the only game in town (I do not count the gas station). Alas, I will be out of
Karuah tomorrow and thus will miss the meat raffle, the meat and seafood raffle,
AND the monster meat raffle. What kind of monsters do they eat here? I don’t
want to know.
(Side note: the RSL is HUGE and was very busy—wait, must go
inside and apply more bug spray godDAMN these flies— and as the only game in town that makes sense.
There is a restaurant, a separate (huge) bar area, a kids something, and I
think some kind of gambling (?) going on as well. As I was leaving, a man made
an announcement that the next courtesy bus would be leaving in five minutes,
and since I am a very curious person I asked him where it was going (okay, yes,
I wanted to know if there was somewhere else to be). He told me it would go
from [name of place that meant nothing to me] all the way to [name of another
place that meant nothing to me] and asked where I needed to go. I was like, no,
no, I’m at the Motor Inn half a block away, and he offered me a ride there
anyway, which is when I realized the RSL courtesy van is like a private “drink
driver” taxi service for members—they’ll pick you up and take you home and I
found that extremely touching though also a tacit explanation for the size of the bar.)
Munchie’s, which is open for breakfast and lunch and made a decent coffee/flat white (and is also for sale!), is next to the local bottle shop and it should tell us all something about Karuah that the Bottle-O was already open when I walked past at 8:30 am.
I am starting to think that friendly couple at the Gum Café may
have been funning me, as my mother would say: Karuah, and I mean this with respect,
does not appear to be a holiday kind of town. I followed this sign to the jetty
this morning.
And found this.
The nice motel lady who directed me to the RSL informed me
kindly that I wouldn’t “stand out” dining alone, and while that has never
concerned me I have been a little worried about my shambolic wrinkled
pajama-esque outfits and my sneakers. The good news is, Australia does not
appear to be a dress-up kind of country.
Today is super overcast with thunderstorms predicted so I’m
going to do some route-planning, which is (for me) a cumbersome process involving
a LOT of checking and rechecking and tongue-sticking-out laboring over my
notebook. I might ride to the next town over, 20 minutes away, to do laundry,
or I might not, as the NYT released a list of their Top 100 books for the year and that list isn’t going to
read itself. (The Great Believers is
on there!)
I want to stress again that the nice people of Karuah have
been very kind and welcoming and to apologize to anyone I might offend by
saying this is a shockingly backwater place and there is SO MUCH Australia
available I would probably choose some other part of it in which to live. (Not
Bathurst.)
That said, it is conveniently located next to some of the
most popular MC roads in NSW. I have an informal list of those I’ve collected
through half-assed research, and so far I have checked off six of what appear
to be the top-sh 10—a couple I won’t get to as they’re out of range (the Black
Spur, the Lion’s Road), but I have had the chance to ride the Alpine Way, the
Putty Road, the Great Ocean, the Kosciusko, Mitta Mitta to Omeo, Kangaroo Valley,
and Fitzroy Falls/Moss Vale, so, Australia, I forgive you the mean old man who told
me Karuah was a nice place to lay up for a day or three (no) and/or I apologize
to him for thinking he said Karuah when he might indeed have said something
else entirely because I’m really seriously getting only about 40% of what
people say to me here. Macca’s. Come ON, Australia.
Finally, since I’ve got the time here in Karuah (sorry, I’ll
stop—it’s not a terrible place, it’s just…not a place), here are the questions
I most often get asked:
- Where are you from?
- Where are you headed?
- All by yourself?
“Where are you headed?” is an easy one: I always say,
cheerfully, “I’m not sure!” That either ends the conversation or gets me a lot
of advice.
“All by yourself?” is the one that annoys me, of course: in
fact, it makes me positively sneery. I’ve not actually sneered at anyone who
asked it (90% of whom are men), in fact I make a point of smiling and saying “Yup!”
I don’t have any statistics on the percentage of multi-day motorcycle trips
that are undertaken solo versus not, and I have done no surveys, formal or
informal, to see if my dude motorcycle friends get asked the same question when
they’re out for a long ride alone. I do know I get asked the question a lot,
easily in 50% of my interactions with the general pop. I’m sure it’s just a
knee-jerk reaction question, without any real implication behind it, but the
contrast between the people who tell me their solo travel was the best thing
they ever did and the people who seem surprised that I am travelling alone,
well: let’s get on the same page, team human beings!
P.S. I just got an “extremely cold weather” alert from
Notify NYC, which is a text message service you can sign up for if you are
interested in being constantly updated about train delays, unplanned road closures,
and/or missing persons. It’s 78 degrees here. Maybe Karuah isn’t so bad…
Pictures!
These purple trees were everywhere yesterday and made me think of Cheryl!
Yeah, CATTLE. What, were you born in a barn?
This is the border on a little playground here in Karuah and I'm digging this Casey's vibe. All the other kids drawing pictures and shit. Please.
Father, this made me think of you: I thought you might enjoy a microwave turned in to a mailbox.
FYI, this is an alien version of the cartoon characters the Snorkels.
And finally, a happiest of birthdays to my beloved Goose! As perhaps mentioned previously I am unbelievably lucky to have an outstanding group of friends I hardly deserve (not to mention the family I have that has—shockingly—not disowned me or even threatened to do so more than once or twice) and this birthday nut job is chief among them. I’d sister-wife with you any day of the week and twice on muumuu Sunday, darlin’.
Evidence I'v been killing it in the selfie game for a while. Just because I have the longest arms doesn't mean I should be given responsibility for the camera, Goggin.
That microwave mailbox is PURE genius!
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