I curse alot when I cycle. ‘Fuck! A big hill’, ‘Fuuck this hill!’ and ‘Fuuuck!’ are exclaimations that regularly pass my lips when turning pedals over. Hillary or Tenzing I’m not. Hills and my foul mouth are two of my short comings as a cyclist (no-one enjoys riding with a whinger). The third field I come up short in is gauging distance.. and in a perverse way I really enjoy this particular fault. You see, I like maps, the old fashioned paper kind. The maps I generally own are out of date, show routes long overgrown and are missing roads recently cut. To my mind, perfect. Forgotten farming roads ooze adventure, dead ends and unmarked routes are exciting.. but measuring distances on these scruffy bits of paper poses a problem for me. It’s the ‘squiggly’ lines, I just can’t get a grasp on them. On more than one occasion I’ve glanced at a map then declared the destination to be, say, 70 kilometres away when it is actually some 100 kilometres distant. Liam White has personally suffered from my third failing when I took him riding in the Northern Territory. “Benny how long is this ride going to be?” he asked. I replied, “20 kilometres mate”. Turned out it was 60. Oops.
I had been imagining a dirt road ride from Dunalley to Rheban returning via the coast for some time. Last night I decided Tuesday (today) would be the day I finally tackled the trip. I dug through my extensive map collection only to find the necessary ‘Prosser’ map missing. No problem, I’ll use the ‘Tasmania’ map instead. No contour lines, inappropriate scale and most of the roads I needed weren’t marked. I estimated the intended route to be about 50 kilometres in distance with an absence of ugly hills. Perfect. I finished packing and went to bed.
Woke late and didn’t mount to bike until mid morning. Not ideal, but I had an easy day ahead of me. Wrong. The ground truth was so, SO different. The hills started slowly at first, then BAM! The Himilayas. Yep, the fucken Himilayas right here in south-east Tasmania. I started to swear. I swore alot. I had epiphanies like ‘What do I value in a cycling shoe? One that is comfortable to walk long distances in’, and ‘I hate hills’. As I’ve already mentioned, no-body likes a whinger so I’ll stop there and finish by saying the views were good. Really good. Oh, and it was ALOT further than 50 kilometres, 80 kilometres would have been closer to the mark.
Did you fall off your bike?
No. Wasn’t on it enough to fall off.
Too many hills? 😉
Looks like fun. I need a good walk.
Keen to tackle this run as an overnighter.. Camp on the Sand Spit at Rheban and ride back via the coast. ..but how about the Central Plateau weekender first? Light dusting of snow over gravel? Cool. Literally.