Kandos (fun fact: this town was named by stringing together
the initials of the company directors of the mine—how…pompous) is the first
place where wifi has actually been an issue. I had intermittent cell service
and as the nice lady at the motel informed me, their wifi was down due to the
winds and, when “the bloke at the pub turns up,” she planned to ask him to “toggle
a switch” several times to see if he could get things going again. (He did
not.) However, if I stayed against the far wall of the pub I could pick up the
local free wifi, which was meant to have a 30 minute limit but I discovered no
one was policing it so I had like 45 minutes of blissful internet connectivity
while I enjoyed cheesy garlic bread and some of their finest sauvignon blanc. (My
other option for dinner would have been regular garlic bread—the parts of
Australia I have been to have not super into meals not involving meat.)
Post-pub I ran across the parking lot to my room since it
was still super windy and now c-o-l-d. I found that rascal Turbo waiting for me
at my door, and when I opened it he went right in, jumped onto the bed, and
passed out COLD. I don’t know what he’d been up to for the two hours since I’d
seen him last but whatever it was must have been exhausting.
I read a book for a while as Turbo snored and just as I was
starting to wonder how to kick him out so I could go to sleep, he woke up,
lapped up an entire bowl of cream* I poured for him, then headed to the door. I
let him out and...never saw him again.
Friday I’d thought about riding the Bylong again as my first
foray had been memorable exclusively for the dust storms, but then I remembered
there were also a lot of potholes so I tried the back way to Mudgee instead,
and that was a gorgeous ride. The roads were in great shape and there was a
stretch that ran along a river or lake or something and I stopped at the dam to
walk out and see what there was to see and it was lovely.
Mudgee had an excellent breakfast spot and a guy on a bike pulled
in while I was there so I interrogated him about sealed versus unsealed roads
in the area. I was 50/50 on putting my head down and trying for Port MacQuarie
or making it a shorter day and stopping in Dubbo. I just like that word so much!
Dubbo. Dubbo Dubbo Dubbo. I had texted my spiritual adviser to see if she thought I should go there, and Gabi was so perfect in her answer that I went to Dubbo. The last 100 km were pretty
dull, road-wise, but the scenery was lovely. Dubbo was pretty cool—the young man checking me into the motel had been in the middle of lovingly
polishing his CBR in the parking lot, and when I joked that he must have a lot
of fun on it, as orange is the fastest color, he immediately pointed to my bike
and said no, red is the fastest color. Nice kid, but obviously he's wrong.
My favorite EVER fastest color story involves my
beloved (weirdo) friend Evan. We were once standing in a loose circle in the
parking lot at The Market, maybe 6 or 8 people, and someone was saying someone
else had gotten a new bike and somebody asked, “What color?” which isn’t a
totally strange question since a lot of bikes come in limited colorways,**
sometimes just three or four options. Anyway, the answer was “black,” and under
his breath, which I just happened to catch because I was standing next to him,
Evan whispered, “Ah, the fastest color,” and geez I just love that guy so much.
You probably had to be there. Also I am convinced that Evan in his gear looks
just like the guy from Grease 2, but then whenever I look up a picture of the
guy from Grease 2 he looks nothing like Evan so I guess I would say Evan
embodies the spirit of the guy from
Grease 2 and I mean that as a compliment.
Dubbo. Dubbo Dubbo Dubbo! Everything is all decorated for
Christmas, which is so weird to me since people are in shorts and shirtsleeves,
but they don’t have Thanksgiving to distract them so they’ve been in full
Christmas mode since, well, I don’t know, but at least since I got here. And
the idea of Christmas being a warm-weather holiday is still anathema to me,
though I’ve done it in Florida, but still: you are upside-down, Australia!
When I was texting with Michael the other day, he said
something like “I’m glad you’re having fun on your trip,” and it was then it
really hit me that yeah, you know, six weeks travelling alone, five of those on
a motorcycle, that has the potential to go a lot of different directions. I
think the fact that I took up with Daz and Gaz (omg seriously Australia) for an
evening says I am about ready to go home—apart from socially required exchanges,
a few text/email*** conversations, and many long discussions with birds, I haven’t really interacted with live people for…well,
shit: over a month. 😊 The fact that I managed an entire evening of
conversation—AND showed up for breakfast!—tells me this trip has done what I
needed it to do: washed my brain clean. The reset button has been hit, the
balky fuse replaced, the burnt-out bulb changed: whatever the metaphor, I feel
like I’m about ready to reenter polite-ish society. Ish. (I definitely talked too much about animals with G & D to the point that one of them asked if that was my profession so again, CASEY: Stop. Talking. About. Animals. To. People.)
That said, I am going to miss the birds here very much, and
I won’t be ready to talk about Turbo for a while.
Today is Sunday
and I made it from Dubbo (dubbbbbbbbboooooo!)
to a place called Tamworth, which is so far very nice. The ride here could be
summed up in a word, and that word could be “boring”—I clearly did not research
my roads carefully enough (the Oxley Highway is not uniformly amazing, FYI), as
it was just loooooooooong straights through what is apparently the part of
Australia nobody wants. Maybe it’s because of the nine bajillion flies. LOOK AT ALL THESE FLIES.
I stopped for lunch in a place called Gilgandra and the inside of this little café was stiflingly
hot so I tried to sit outside where there were these cute little tables and
chairs but no people and even though I was liberally covered in bug spray,
including my CLOTHING, I finally had to hurry up and finish my coffee because
the only way to escape this pestilence was at speed. An hour or so later I
pulled over to take off a layer and I was completely and immediately set upon
and it was AWFUL. I wouldn’t mind so much if the fuckers didn’t want to land on my skin parts. Here I was trying to take a picture to show the flies clustered on my shoulder, which is why I was making an exaggeratedly sad face, because body flies are weird and no-thank-you but not the worst...but then look what happened. JUST AS I WAS TAKING THE PICTURE A FLY LANDED ON MY MOUTH.
UGH. I have put
bug repellent all over myself but I cannot begin to think I will put it on my
LIPS.
While the ride
was dull, the scenery was sometimes interesting, at least outside of the
scrubland part. There were a bunch of these extremely symmetrical hills—what’s
up with that?
Sadly, being in
Tamworth tonight instead of Port MacQ means I’m still two days from Sydney,
where I have to be by 4 pm on Tuesday. I could make Sydney in one long, hard,
day, but I’m obsessed with riding the Oxley from here to Port MacQ (that is
apparently the only good part) and after all this cold and wind I have promised
myself an afternoon/evening on a proper beach. (I’m also at the point of the
trip where 400 km feels like plenty of kms for a day.) I’ll make the coast
tomorrow, then back to the bike shop the day after, but that means I will not
be overnighting in the Central Coast, where Gaz had so kindly offered me a room
and “a feed.” If I had stopped there, I'm guessing we’d have gone next door to hang out with Daz, who brews his
own beer, and they’d tell me about the rest of their trip (which involved -2
degrees celsius windchill on the day I skipped riding, ugh), and, if the timing
had worked out, I would have been treated to a 3pm pelican feeding event that,
Gaz told me, brings out hundreds of
pelicans—those crazy big ones!—and while just writing this up makes me smile to
think about how fun those guys are and how lucky I am to have met them, I also
know it’s hard to step in the same river twice and I wonder if my imagined
version of our perfect day is exactly the right thing to make sure I leave
Australia with at least one regret. Gents, you’re not only the first people I’ve
actually spoken to in over a month, but you’ve given me a reason to come back,
and lord knows that’s not an easy decision because FLIES OMG THE FLIES. What
happens to Australians the first time they visit a place that’s not cursed by a
biblical plague of insects? Do they come back?? WHY.
Gaz & Daz
aside, I’m still bummed about the lack of interaction with other motorcyclists
on the road. Some will wave with their left hands, and then apparently the
other kind of acknowledgment is a nod (a NOD—what are we, British??), but I’ve
passed tons of bikes who just ignored me and I wonder if the very culture of motorcycling is different here
because there’s not the wave. I mean (look away, mother!), I have been leaned
over in a left-hand turn and still managed to free my hand to drop a low sign
at a bike or two coming toward me. I’ve put my hand down for huge rides going
by, even when I really needed that hand to change gears. (I have mentioned this
before but there are a variety of ways to acknowledge other riders; my preference
is to drop my left hand, two fingers extended toward the road, my palm facing forward.
I most often get that same gesture in return, and especially when it is from
someone on a bike completely different from mine it gives me a little frisson
that we’re all legit in this together.)
As I get toward
the end of this trip I’m taking stock in a lot of things. I’m covered in bruises
as I have been for the past 5 weeks: I’ve ridden a lot of kmiles and those have
kmicked up a lot of rocks/insects/whothefuckknowswhatAustralia and as soon as
one bruise heals I find another. The muscle of my right shoulder is yowza. I do
try to focus on alignment when I’m riding but in the end, that’s the arm working
the throttle and squishing that shoulder up is practically impossible to avoid.
My knees are doing fine, as this bike has crash bars and I can turn those into
highway pegs; my bottom gets sore but then I stand up for a while and it’s better.
My neck has been put to the test this last week or so because of wind pushing
on my helmet, so it’s exciting to think I might be starting to look like The
Rock or at least some kind of thug. When I get home, my massage guy, Dennis, is going to be like come ON but I'm pretty sure he secretly loves a challenge.
My riding suit
is holding up pretty well, however, my most beloved summer gloves are on their
last legs. I have big hands so it’s hard for me to find light-weight gloves
that fit well, and fit is everything when those gloves are enclosing the hands
that need to be able to get to the clutch and/or brake levers quickly, and/or
feather the throttle just so. They’ve stopped making this model of glove,
naturally, but the next edition looks similar enough so I’m hopeful they will
fit as perfectly as these have when I finally send this pair upstate to live
out their days happily grabbing clutch levers in the sunshine on a motorcycle
farm. I’ve had these gloves for…wow, maybe three or four years, and for the
plane ride from New Zealand I had stuffed them in my helmet (space is at a premium)
and let me just say my helmet did not smell amazing when I put it on the next
day. (Gloves are washed by rain, FYI, or at least mine are.)
Why this long
story about my favorite pair of gloves? MY. DIARY. I really love these gloves—they
just fit so perfectly. And there is something deliciously martial about pulling
on armored anything, and gloves in particular. However. These gloves don’t have
much of a gauntlet (which is a good thing for warm weather) and when I’m at
speed, my jacket sleeve blows back a little and I end up with this strip of “tan”
on my left wrist.
It’s my left
wrist only, because my right wrist is mostly bent so that the gap between the
glove and my sleeve is closed. I noticed today that this posture hasn’t just
given me an incredibly stupid “tan line” (Shadna told me she had just assumed
it was dirt the first time she noticed it, which I guess makes me the kind of
person who could be walking around with dirt smeared all over her, awesome),
but it’s also caused my gloves to wear unevenly. In case you were wondering just
how boring today’s ride was, I spent some time noticing that my left wrist
being straight put my left knuckles under the shadow of the mirror, while my
right hand was rolled back and those knuckles were in the sun. (Omg obviously this changes depending on the direction in which I am riding and the angle of the sun and the position of Mars but go with it for the point of this story.) So, I took them off and put them down just as they come off my hands, and yup--it is clear as day which hand does what. Isn’t this
FASCINATING?
Yeah, I think I
might be about ready to come home.
Pictures!
This is a theme
in my Australia experience—if you’re keeping score, that’s two OPEN signs to
one CLOSED sign.
Garrie sent me
these: proof positive I was taking Bingo way too seriously (or not seriously
enough?) and that a handicapable motel room also comes in handy for lunatics.
And finally, BIRDS.***** This crazy bird has a spike on its head! A head spike!! Is this decorative?
Useful? What are you DOING, bird?
This gorgeous
guy and a bunch of his/her brethren were just hanging out with head-spike bird.
These guys, on the other hand, weren't in the mood for pictures.
Will this be my
last animal butt of this trip? Something tells me no, more butts await me. Heart-eyes emoji I love even your butts, animals of Australia!
*Finally! A use
for the ubiquitous milk/cream in every mini fridge. The nice lady checking me
at the delightful Ashbury Motor Inn went to get a bottle to give me with my key
and when I said I didn’t need it there was the awkward pause while she
processed that information.
**Colorways is technically for yarn and I believe the
correct motorcycle term is “paint scheme” or some such but this is MY diary.
***Skfloo reminded me of another excellent story about the
WHAT TIME IS IT super-seniors who lived next door to us at King & Queen. One of them had a test coming up in some history class and so he came
over to ask Shan for a...briefing, I guess, as the test was either that day or
the next and it wasn’t like he was going to learn all of history from her in 30
minutes. Shan is super at history and so she zeroed in on what might come up on
his exam, and she’s talking and he’s nodding and I’m thinking there’s no way he’s
getting this so I give him the only paper I have at hand which is the back of the
envelope from our electric bill and Rhett**** starts assiduously taking notes.
Shannon pauses and says “Is this making sense?” and Rhett nods furiously, yes
yes absolutely, and then he says, “so the fassals,” and Shan doesn’t bat an
eye, just interjects, “the vassals,” and Rhett says, “yeah, the vassals, they
were the ones who…” and when he left we just looked at each other and
wondered what the term was for a sixth-year senior. Super-super senior?
****You know you go to college in the south when….
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