Category: bikes

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bikes general

penguin smuggling

Saturday’s ride brought penguins and apple crumble. Both of those actually came after the ride. Over six hours we covered 107 km, and 50+ checkpoints (I can’t be bothered recounting how many we actually got to) all around Phillip Island. Then cheese and vegie burger toasties, with tomato sauce of course, and apple crumble with custard. Then penguins. I recommend the penguin parade at Phillip Island if you’re into visiting over-priced tourist traps with coach loads of internationals, and sitting on concrete bleachers to view a floodlit beach. Or if you’ve found that standard stores just don’t stock enough toy penguins to satisfy you.

They were cute though, I’ll give them that. When watching them heading to their burrows from the boardwalk afterwards, one 10 year old girl proclaimed “It’s so cute, awwwwwww [noise becoming increasingly high pitched to the point where I was worried she might explode if the penguin did anything cuter]”.

There was no penguin under the car when we got out though.

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bikes general

hell of the northcote

Who knew there were so many cobblestone alleys in Melbourne? I certainly didn’t.

 
I only got around to reading up on the Paris-Roubaix after the Melburn-Roobaix race was over. It’s held annually in the mid-April rainy season, 260km of muddy riding over the cobblestoned roads and hard rutted tracks of northern France’s coal-mining region. Apparently the route has had to be changed in recent years, as many of the original cobbled sections are being repaired and replaced with smoother surfaces that have much less romance about them. The race was first held in 1896, but only picked up it’s ‘The Hell of the North’ tag in the first race post-WWI, with the riders racing through areas destroyed by the war (the Melburn-Roobaix ‘Hell of the Northcote’ tag doesn’t quite have the same ring to it).

“Let me tell you, though – there’s a huge difference between Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. They’re not even close to the same. In one, the cobbles are used every day by the cars, and kept up, and stuff like that. The other one – it’s completely different . . . The best I could do would be to describe it like this – they plowed a dirt road, flew over it with a helicopter, and then just dropped a bunch of rocks out of the helicopter! That’s Paris-Roubaix. It’s that bad – it’s ridiculous.”

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bikes general

melburn-roobaix (the hell of the northcote)

So, Saturday was the inaugural Melburn-Roobaix.

MELBURN-ROOBAIX. An idea for a regular alleycat evolved into one of Melbourne’s biggest and best underground cycling events.

Over 100 riders rode all over Melburn in search of checkpoints tucked away in the roughest corners of each suburb, riding rough pave, dirt roads, traversing stairs, crossing railways, and carrying supplies.

When they were done, their musettes full, they rode a final lap of glory around Brunswick Velodrome.

Beautiful weather, lots of fun :)

Here’s a few of the Abbotsford cycling folks hanging out in the velodrome, post-race. Doesn’t seem like winter at all.

 
The event photos are up too – you can see us lurking in the backgrounds (and foregrounds) of a few photos.

Today, rain started bucketing down. Luckily, not until after we’d finished riding the Yarra single trails. Where I managed to crash and land on my head. Just a little bit. My bike decided to stop for some reason, and as there was no prior agreement about this, I went off over the handlebars.

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bikes general

got unicycles? (or ‘reasons you shouldn’t leave us alone in the house over a long wet weekend’)

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bikes general

it were always rainin

And the worst part about the constant precipitation, is that it’s not actually quite cold enough for it to be falling as proper snow at any of the resorts. Can’t ski, can’t climb, can’t unicycle. AND WHY DID IT NOT SAVE ALL OF THE RAIN FOR DURING THE WEEK, HEY?

 
Note – Temporarily acquired unicycle has been thieved back by the person I borrowed it from. Just like when you were kids and neither of you were interested in playing with the pogo stick, until you decided one day that you felt like having a play on it and suddenly your brother decides he too wants to play on the pogo stick, and then you end up fighting and his front teeth get knocked loose and there is blood, and then neither of you gets to play on the pogo stick. Except in this case I don’t have a higher authority to whine to.