What are the chances that you’d get a week of overcast skies with storms that dumped over 100mm of rain but then have beautiful sunshine for Ulysses ride day? Almost zero, from my experience.
Usually it’s the other way round – weeks of bright sunshine are followed by gale-force winds, torrential rain and hail the size of basketballs on ride day. However, the malevolent weather gods must have been on holidays on Sunday because we were blessed with near-perfect weather after a week of storms.
I didn’t make the start of the ride at Bungendore but caught up with the rest of the mob at the Meridian Café at Marulan. I had just parked the bike and taken off my helmet when Al and his eight acolytes (Al-colytes?) turned up.
I immediately marked the Meridian down because they don’t have meat pies and I had to settle for a freshly baked scone with jam and whipped cream, but the coffee was good.
The next part of the ride involves some tricky route-finding, so Al handed over the reins to Scott, who as usual had the route saved in his GPS. This was Scott’s first ride since a crash landing off a ladder in mid-December saw the firies rescue him from his roof and the ambos take him to hospital with a broken rib and several cracked vertebrae. It was good to have him back on the road!
Apart from getting stuck behind some slow drivers and lots of traffic in Kangaroo Valley, the ride went smoothly. We refuelled in Nowra and headed on to Huskisson, where we were gobsmacked by the slow, heavy traffic, crowds of people wandering from one hipster store to the next, and bugger-all parking spots.
We eventually found a place to park and hiked a few blocks to the huge Huskisson Hotel, which has a nice view over Jervis Bay. The food was good and despite the mobs of diners and a warning that it would take 30 minutes, it came quickly and, amazingly, without any mistakes.
But the pub is a real production line place, geared mostly for younger Sydney tourists. A waitress told me if we’d come the day before we wouldn’t have made it through the door because they had weddings, parties, twenty-firsts and wakes all booked in for the day.
By now it was warm and muggy, so we were glad to get back on the road. Apart from a small route-finding glitch near Turpentine Road, it was smooth sailing all the way to Nerriga. The bush is still recovering from last summer’s bushfires, but it looked a lot better than last time I went this wayScott and Dieter continued on while the rest of us had a 15-minute break at Nerriga. Just short of Tarago we were stopped by a line of traffic banked up behind a crash. Someone told Al the road had been closed for two hours and it would probably be another couple of hours before it was cleared.
So, we backtracked to Windellama, then Goulburn, and headed home via the freeways. The question of what had happened to Scott and Dieter, who presumably were ahead of us in the traffic jam at the accident, was answered by a text message I saw from Scott as I pulled up at home at 6pm.
I quote: “How did your trip home go? Dieter and I waited for Cullula Road to reopen, and we were only held up 15 or 20 minutes. I had a cold beer in my hand at 5:25!”
Oh well, you win some, you lose some. The ride was only supposed to have been 460km, but our final detour pushed it out (according to the Speedometer 55 app on my iPhone) to 535km. Nonetheless, it was a great day out.
Ian
- Alan Munday Yamaha FJR1300
- Scott England BMW R1250RT
- Kevin Sherman Indian
- Hartmut Kehm BMW R1250GS
- Bill Henshaw Triumph Explorer
- Chas Towie Honda ST1300
- Neil McRitchie Kawasaki GTR1400
- Mike Allan Triumph Thruxton
- Dieter Walter Ducati Multistrada 950
- Ian Paterson Honda GL1800 Goldwing
