Riding our luck. PART 1

A SORDID TALE OF THIRST AND PUNISHMENT IN THREE PARTS.

After a brutal bender of a Christmas/New Year period it was about time to get back into the saddle and finally get more blood than booze pumping around the old arteries. Saturday morning was the designated time and Treadlies bike shop in Kingston the place. Early on there seemed to be a fair bit of interest in the mountain bike run which would take us climbing up out of Kingston, paddock bashing down to Longley and back again via some beautiful flowing single-track.

The fist obstacle of the day was the heat. Hobart really turned it on for us with a cloudless 32 degrees. Too brutal for a ride? Most obviously thought so because when we set out there were only 3 hardcore B’n’C faithful churning the pedals.

I felt like I was on the back foot early. Right from the moment we pushed off a 10.30am I was struggling. It could have been the heat but I can’t be sure it wasn’t the 10 beers from the previous night that seemed to be dragging my pace down to a slow crawl. Never the less I chose to suffer on as Ben and Mischa led the way up out of Kingston across some School grounds, up some horse trails and eventually onto a gravel road which crept ever upwards towards the high point of the ride. As we ducked from one side of the road to the other, desperate to ride in any shade we could find, we ground upwards until eventually the gradient dropped, evened out and finally we were at the crest of the climb. “All down hill from here” was the call from Ben. Ben is a liar.

Ben talking to the coach...

 On the phone to the coach. “What do you mean rest and prepare

for the racing at tomorrow’s carnival?”

 

Our destination was the Longley water hole. I was to find out later that this is just a few hundred metres past the Longley pub. From our vantage a the top of the hill our fearless leader Ben took us down some well defined horse tracks which promised to lead us straight to the Longley pub. Well… not exactly. The horse trails quickly became open paddocks and the trails disappeared. Before long we found ourselves heafting bikes over barbed wire fences on private land following animal tracks and heading vaguely down hill towards what we hoped was the highway to Longley. It was getting hotter.

The only sign of civilisation at this point was a solitary chimney in the middle of the bush. It was the last remaining sign that there was once a home out here in the deep bush of Tassie’s South but the walls had long ago crumbled and disappeared. We stopped to finish off the last of the water we were carrying before we set off again hoping to stumble across a road of some sort. Ben was still leading fearlessly but the heat was getting worse and my empty water bottle was playing on my mind. We needed to find something, anything to drink, and soon.

We were hopelessly lost.

There used to be a house in the middle of nowhere. Not anymore.

 

To be continued…

One thought on “Riding our luck. PART 1”

  1. awesome.. though you missed the bit where I went over the handlebars and the bit where Mischa ate a powerbar. Looking fwd to the next instalment..

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