With most of the regulars away at the National Rally in Mornington, it was a toss up as to who would turn up for the ride to Canowindra. As it turned out, three non-Rallying regulars and four irregulars were ready to go at 9am, and it was a pretty good mix of personalities and riding skills.
We took the usual route to the Adequate Café in Boorowa for pie and coffee, and it was on this leg of the ride that a pair of miracles occurred. On the Barton Highway we sat behind a little blue hatchback that was travelling at exactly the same speed as I had set on my cruise control, and on Lachlan Valley Way the same thing happened with a 4wd towing a trailer with an upside-down red wheelbarrow in it.
No overtaking needed, no braking needed, we were all just fellow travellers in tune with the cosmos . . . Such confluences of fortune happen exceedingly rarely; twice in one morning almost had me stringing up the prayer flags.
From Boorowa we rode via Frogmore, Wyangala Dam and Woodstock. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the road surface was its usual happy self and the riding was delightful. Only the bare, drought-coloured paddocks intruded on our lightness of being.
On the steep, winding climb out of Wyangala Dam, Dieter demonstrated his mastery of the twisty-turny as he disappeared out of sight ahead of me while remaining strictly within the speed limit. My 2012 Goldwing’s suspension can best be described as crappy (especially at the front) but Mike had a much smoother ride on his brand-new Goldwing bagger with the wishbone front suspension and DCT automatic transmission.
At the Mid Western Highway we flipped right then immediately left onto a back road to Canowindra, where we lunched at the Deli Lama. Despite its name, it had no llama or even alpaca on the menu and it offered not a taste of nirvana. What it did offer, however, was fish & chips and, seeing as we were going to the Age of Fishes Museum afterwards, that is what I chose for lunch.
The museum was only a 200m walk from the café but some of our crew (no names!) resisted even that short footslog and had to be enticed to cross the street. However, the loneliness of the long-distance pedestrian was forgotten when we paid our piddling pensioner price of $8 and spent an hour or so learning about not the age of the fishes I had eaten for lunch, but the geological history of Australia.
To cut a long story short (for it is a long story, spanning some 4.6 billion years), the Age of Fishes was what The More Educated Classes call the Devonian Period (360–420 million years ago). It seems that a bit less than 360 million years ago, a pond on the supercontinent of Gondwana dried up and thousands of fish died in a single place only to be covered with silt and buried for millions of years.
And that pond, of course, was at Canowindra, in the backyard of Barry and Madge Mandageriafairfaxi, after whom one of the fossilised fishes – now the NSW State Fossil – is named (though they discourage visitors). Global superstar David Attenborough has visited the Age of Fishes Museum but even he was denied access to Barry and Madge’s backyard.
Never mind, there were plenty of ancient fossils in the museum to keep us living fossils happy as, armed with our audio tour thingys, we followed the geological timeline from the Precambrian Period (before the invention of dancing) right through to the present. A not inconsiderable ride, 4.6 billion years in one afternoon!
After I managed to get everyone together for a photo (talk about herding fossilised cats!), we returned home via Lachlan Valley Way and the highways, stopping for fuel in Boorowa. Dieter branched off at Cowra onto Darby’s Falls Road and discovered that the roads from Frogmore to Rugby, Dalton and almost anywhere else in the known universe, are gravel.
Our day’s excursion cost 450km according to my GPS or 470km according to the Wing’s trip meter (take your pick!).
Ian Paterson.
Riders:
Ian Paterson.
Riders:
Ian Paterson Honda GL1800
Neil McRitchie Kawasaki GTR1400
Mike Wallace Honda GL1800
Dieter Walter Ducati Multistrada 950
Hartmut Kehm BMW R1200GS
Peter Faulks Suzuki GSX750F
John Grace Tiger 1200
Neil McRitchie Kawasaki GTR1400
Mike Wallace Honda GL1800
Dieter Walter Ducati Multistrada 950
Hartmut Kehm BMW R1200GS
Peter Faulks Suzuki GSX750F
John Grace Tiger 1200
