Power trip

Day 47. The Gap to The Gap

We've had no power on the laptops or my phone for a few days, so we decided to do a 60km-ish round trip on our bikes to hook up to the grid for a while.

You may be taller than me, Nolan....

We rode along the shoreline dirt track for 12kms to Balgowan. Now known as 'the town that once was' AKA 'the town soon to be'. Deserted. Pretty much completely. Heard a dog bark and a few cars drove through. The houses were either pretty much dilapidated or brand spanking new and BIG! Definitely a holiday home spot. No shops. And with no cafe in sight, onwards to Maitland.

But my arms are longer...if I could stretch them a bit more...maybe...

It was quite a hill to Maitland! Not a particularly steep one, but a long steady one without a bend in it. Pretty taxing on the old Lily legs. Tim switched on his encouraging-sargeant-major routine for me and we were soon singing away army-style with whatever random rubbish we could make rhyme, to the tune of whatever worked at the time! Time flew, we reached the top of the hill, to find another hill. And another. Etc....Until we reached Maitland, 20kms later.

Unstable Cliffs. We've all met them. 

A lovely couple in the cafe let us plug in our laptops and phone while we ate baked potatoes, lasagne, two cheesecakes (one strawberry, one mars bar), coffees, chocolate milkshakes and juices. Sated, stuffed, a bit windy, and three hours later we jumped back on the bikes for the return trip.

Wheeeeeeee! 20kms downhill! Awesome! While it took us about two and a half hours to ride the 32kms there, we took just under an hour and a half to get back. The dirt track between The Gap and Balgowan is more sand than dirt, so lots of skidding and giggling, but we made it back without coming off! High fives all round!

I hope they've got erosion insurance

I asked Tim to make dinner as I'm a lazy wench at times and he made a magnificent pumpkin salad. He'd caramelized the pumpkin in the frying pan with red onion, camembert and mixed seeds. Yum! We sat on the dunes watching the sun set as we ate. Doesn't get much better than that.

Shark! Rock!

Look Lily. Not a shark. A rock. No, two rocks, stuck together.

Day 45. The Gap to The Gap

Lily: SHARK! Tim! I've seen a shark!

What was it doing, Lil?

You know that thing that dolphins do in the water, jumping out. I just saw a fin, but it was a shark fin!

No. That was a dolphin.

Lots of them. According to our wildlife book, a 'common dolphin'. Such a poor name for such an awesome creature. We saw their pod swimming past a few times and took the boats out but didn't manage to get up close, they're quite shy this lot. We had a splash around in rock pools close to shore as it was fairly choppy out there (minor chop, but enough to get me spooked today). It was fun trying to manoeuvre a big green machine around little rock pools though.

A gentle day other than that excitement. A quick stroll to check out the neighbourhood, and a lovely sunset.

The Gap

Day 44. 23/10/11: Jamestown to The Gap

The behemoth. I don't think this
photo does justice to its enormousness

Lily: We've decided we need a break. From the Mawson Trail, that is. There's more to tell, but right now we're both a bit sick of the various injuries we've copped so far and the niggles and pains of past injuries that have revisited us since we've been on the trail. So. A beach holiday and some rejuvenation seems in order! 

We've come to The Gap - listed in good ole 'Camps 6' (the guide to free campsites around Australia) with a big tick from them for awesomeness. It's situated on the Yorke Peninsula, on the Spencer Gulf side (for you place name/English history nerds, Spencer Gulf is named after Earl George John Spencer, ancestor of dear old Princess Di).

Today's crazy wildlife. It attached itself to
Tim's thumb with those spiky little feet.

It took us a fair while to get down here from Jamestown (Jamestown with its modern shopping conveniences and distinct lack of soul) but we went via Clare, a very lovely town (and named after County Clare, Ireland and slap bang in the middle of the Clare Valley wine region. I didn't buy any wine! Crazy!!) where we had coffee and cake and a good leg stretch before hitting the road for another two hours of driving.

We found ourselves a cozy nook to park the van, set up a super-rain catching tarp (it has been threatening to rain and I love catching the stuff!!) and had a peek over the (our) sand dune to look at the (our) beach. Not a soul on it. There are a couple of other people at the camp site, but not in sight. After Jamestown's sort-of-city-ness, this was just what I needed. 

The van at The Gap. Note awesome rain-catching
tarp set up and Lily fixing up blisters.

Our patch

Flat out

Day 42. 21/10/11: Manatoo Road to Bundaleer Forest

Lily's bit

Hmmm. Interesting.... Yesterday's feeling fit and strong didn't make an appearance on this morning's ride. We started off in the rain, feeling good. We were heading into another forest and they're always nice. After about a kilometre we reached a big puddle straddling the whole road. Negotiated well. Feeling confident. Around a corner past a ruin of a hut and a reasonable hill stretching up for a few kms in front of us. That's ok. It's wet and my tyres are caked in mud, but this is cool. It's lovely to be out in the rain. Up the hill, slowly. Getting slower. Breathing harder. 'I'm really finding this hard today, Tim', says I. But I'll feel better soon. My legs will wake up and I'll be speedy again. A bit of gravel road to kick off all this mud and I'll be right. 3kms later, the hill still doing its  hilly thing...I'm really struggling! But I'm ok with hard, it's probably all the mud caked on my tyres making my bike twice as heavy. It'll get easier.

Umm. No. 

'Lil, you've got a flat'. WHAT???!!! There were tears. Of relief that it wasn't just me being unfit? Frustration at being so dim and not noticing? Something like that. I'm impressed at my lack of swearing, actually. That was a moment of pure frustrated, angry, relieved emotion and I did well to keep it together (I think. Tim may have seen it differently).

The tyre wasn't staying inflated, so we did a quick pump up and raced down hill to the van. (I was flat again about half way down, mind.) 6kms on a flat tyre in the mud, uphill, in the rain. I was feeling pretty crappy. So I told Tim to go on without me. It meant he could just run unencumbered by a whinging pom and I'd pick him up in the forest later.

I repacked the van with our muddy bikes and drove to the pick up point. My water bladder broke in my backpack. Soaked. Not my day. A good day for sitting inside the van not doing anything!

We're in Jamestown now. The town with modern shopping facilities. It's a very industrial-rural town. There are a couple of grain silos on the outskirts and shops catering for farmers. It was RM Williams' birth place. RM Williams: the bush outfitter. Clothing for the man-about-farm. But it's pretty soulless. Tim put it well: it's a town that wants to be a city. It's not happy with just being a great rural town, so has car yards and oddly placed sections of paving. No bookshops. No history on show. But I'm very very happy that it has a Foodland. Foodland hummus! AND my favorite muesli! To hell with history! Score!

Tim's bit:

Lily's not a whinging pom. She's a delicate flower having mud thrown at her by Fate and flat tyres. But for me it was great she decided not to ride today. Not for the reason she suggested but because the course was hilly, wet, slippery and varied between muddy 4WD tracks and just invisible paths crossing paddocks covered in long wet grass. It was very slow going and I wouldn't have wanted to do it twice. There were some lovely moments: watching kangaroos bound through long grass is somehow beautiful. It's kind of like the land version of watching dolphins dive in and out of water. Seeing this every now and then lifted my spirits when they were down with my feet, sloshing around in my soaking wet shoes. It felt like a true cross country trail half-marathon, and one I kind of felt like I did well to finish. And I'm not saying "Finish in under such-and-such-a-time" - just finish. I was going to sum it up simply as: "Progress was made" but that probably doesn't suggest how much of an achievement that is some days. I would have held my arms up when I reached the van, but my left shoulder is playing up (weird - all this running and the thing that's really hurting is my shoulder!) but I did manage a good WOOT! and a bit of a YAY! as I met up with Lily.

The best bit about the Jamestown Caravan Park is that a portable ocean liner - a beheamoth of lifestyle travel - the ark Noah bought when he retired to drive around Australia - has parked next to us. The thing is big enough to be a terrorist target. If we were a single french fry, it would be the burger grill. It has been supersized so much it even has an extendable midrift which, after it parked, extended out towards us like a fat man loosening his belt. I was reading at the time, and wanted to yell out: "Whoa there, boy: not too far! Maybe just keep the shirt tucked in, eh?!"

But good showers, good dinner, and hopefully a good night's sleep! I think the next few days I may be reduced again to doing a lot more walking than running, and boasting (honestly) that "progress was made!" I am enjoying it. The harder things bring out something like the joy of having something to really have a crack at. Nature all wet and windy and spooky is cool, too!

(Can I put in a plug for Tim’s book-chatting blog here? Follow the link from our travel blog or go straight to http://booksthatmakeyougohmmm.blogspot.com, then click on “The Invitation” to get the general idea... I still haven’t written anything for it, but will soon!)

You're only as old as the pig you can smell

Day 41. Laura to Manatoo Road

Tim's bit:
I haven't posted for a few days. I've been struggling a bit, for a variety of reasons. For one, it seems that this process means that every injury I've ever had that hasn't been completely shifted onwards has come back to visit, or in other words, any imbalance in my body... and I'm almost forty, of course I'm not balanced!... As Lily and I have taken to saying: "Hmmm. Interesting."

Today we were up pretty early and away by about 8am, hoping to avoid the heat. It was already 24 degrees at 6am (according to techno-boffin and her phone that knows all things), but thankfully the clouds stuck around and I don't think it got much hotter than that.

Today's ride/run went slowly up, then a swooping but sandy downhill, then slowly up again. All up it was a touch over 19kms. Done by 9:15, changed and turned around by 9:30, it was into the wind for the long steady downhills and one challenging uphill. We were back by 11:30. (Lily, riding, wisely chose to speed away from me, running, over the last five or so kilometres, although the stench from the pig farm didn't seem as bad on the way back as it did on the way out! She was back a bit earlier.) I did feel for the people whose house is set in among the pigs. I bet visitors don't stay as long as they might and the kids always have to go to other houses for sleepovers. They need one of the methane capture setups that the pig farm near Clunes got - turning a negative (the smell of pig-shit never won anyone friends among their neighbours) into a positive, as they now manage to generate enough power to light up a whole town, and they don't smell anymore!

When I got back, I walked into the campsite looking, I guess, like I was a bicycle short of being a cyclist, and was asked by fellow-caravan-park-residents if I'd put it in for a service. I explained the story of what we were doing and they were lovely about it and we talked briefly about how they'd met a girl who was cycling around Australia etc etc. I signed off to go and jump in a cold shower.

How many people apart from me do their best thinking in the shower? (Go on, hands up, I'm counting...) Cold showers may not be the best version, but they do calm down sore bodies, and anyway: two things occurred to me:

(1) I have invisible fences in my head. This may sound a little dramatic, schizophrenic or else just stupid, but living in and out of caravan parks has shown me that the idea of privacy is just a weird fence we put around ourselves and other people in order to... what?... avoid talking to them or being interrupted by them. I guess growing up in a city and then being relatively shy and generally busy trying to do things (mostly obscure, useless things like write stories or run long distances, which I spend my time trying to invest with value by being really busy doing them) I am used to the idea that these fences exist. It's the custom. It's the way cities function. If they didn't, we'd all end up stopping for chats all the time and nothing would get done. People who've been on the road for a long enough time - and that's not that long - tend to lose that sense of time and space. When I stopped to chat, I walked into their circle and stayed for as long as it took for us to have our chat, and this wasn't an invasion of their time or space or privacy. I came away realising that it's probably the people with fences in their heads that are weird, because those fences are, really, just inside my head, even when they're not.

(2) Always check your underpants for grass seeds. They're not comfortable.

That idea of "doing something of value" has been in my head a little bit recently. Running the Mawson Trail is probably less meaningful than one half hour of teaching work. I'm getting fitter; I'm learning a lot about running; I'm hanging out with Lily and seeing new parts of Australia. I do seem to be caught between The Slow Travel Movement (an offshoot of the Slow Food Movement, it emphasises slow, connected, appreciative, attentive travel) and Stop Wasting So Much Time!!!, which I think is called the basic philosophy of the entire 20th Century! We could cover 800kms a day in a car! I could learn about nature by doing a course or just reading the damn internet, and then we could go and make some money and get on with living the god damned dream...

Apart from that, a lot of people seem to respond to us like we're 18 or 20 years old, which I find oddly entertaining. Lots of comments like "Good for you. Do it while you're still young." "...while you still can" as if we have not had jobs or careers or anything before now. It seems to imply that we have a freedom no one over 25 or under 65 has, and since we're not seniors towing a van (lining up the next petrol station with good restrooms and settling for some shade next to the caravan for exercise) we must be kids, which leaves me feeling strangely like I'm too young to be hanging out with the grey-nomads but too old to be getting pissed with the backpackers (who are pretty scarce in these parts anyway)... so we're odd-bods. Apart from the usual anxiety about not fitting into a neat social box, it's nice to have to make it up as we go. Hmmm Interesting.

Lily's bit:

Just a quick one from me... We've had a great day's ride. I am looking forward to getting back into running, but am soooo tempted to keep improving my riding! Feeling fit and strong and seeing daily improvements is cool!

Laura has been a treat, but I'm excited by Jamestown, our next stop. It has "modern shopping facilities", whatever that means (Tim thinks it means there's an eftpos machine in the local shop). I'm hoping for book shops and maybe a good supermarket where I can pick up my favourite muesli. It's the little things that make me happy...

It's raining and forecast to carry on like this for the next couple of days. It's all good. We're warm. We're dry. And I have a bottle of very nice local shiraz to keep me occupied. Yay!

Things that make you go hmmm...and yum and yay

Our little spot at Laura Caravan Park. Loving the grass!

Day 40. Laura

Lily's bit:

Urgh. A shocking night's sleep for Lily. And Tim's foot is giving him a bit of grief, so needs resting. And today it reached some hellish temperature. So we had a clean up van/study/writing/reading/eating ice cream-day instead of a running/riding/hurting/sweating day.

Things of note:

Ice cream - Go the honey over the chocolate orange.

Clean up - Still no sign of my missing fivefinger shoe. Found the other folding chair though.

Free bread rolls - You can always count on them in South Australia; don't bother ordering garlic bread.

Study - Nine bulletin board posts to do in ten days? Do four in one day. Yeah!

Reading - Good. Especially in air conditioned cafes and hammocks while eating ice cream.

Writing - Blogging is a great way to get writing and thinking. About writing and thinking, especially.

Bread Roll Appreciation Society Annual General Meeting

(Can I put in a plug for Tim’s book-chatting blog here? Follow the link from our travel blog or go straight to http://booksthatmakeyougohmmm.blogspot.com, then click on “The Invitation” to get the general idea... I still haven’t written anything for it, but will soon!)

Penne in a creamy avocado sauce. So good.

Lovely Laura

Day 39. Wirrabarra Forest to Laura

Lily's bit:

These pics are actually from yesterday's ride, but I've had two
glasses of Laura shiraz, so I'm a little retarded.
Good wine, but.
Anyway, this is still Wirrabarra Forest,
just a different bit of it. So there.

The ride to Laura was one of my faves of the trip. It was about 23k. The first 7 or 8k was in the forest - yellow grit road - a bit skiddy on the downhills, a bit un-grippy on the up, with hidden potholes in every dip. But the forest is lovely - it was a hot day, so great to be sheltered from the sun. The next 7 or 8k was sort of single track/sort of 4WD track, but downhill and FUN! There's nothing quite like abandoning all fear and swooping down rocky hills, sliding around corners and balancing on a knife's edge between two massive ruts in the road! Ok, I wimped out of a big puddle / creek section, got off and walked, but I didn't want to get muddy! The remaining 7 or 8k was, for the most part, a rail trail, so flat as a pancake all the way into Laura. I found a bundle of stored up energy from somewhere, so we fair zoomed into town. All up, we only took an hour and 15 minutes to do 23k. That's really fast for me!

We had a pit stop in Laura for a coffee/juice/muffin before the journey back to Wirrabarra Forest.  We like Laura. It's another of those towns that is very welcoming to outsiders. The service is great, the town is well-kept, there are handy information boards running along its expansive median strip (Laura is the Home of Ice Cream. If you ever see any Golden North ice cream, try it. Especially the honey-flavoured ice cream, apparently. I'll be giving it a go tomorrow. Also, Laura was the winner of the 1941 London Show (or something like that) for its quality flour). Anyway, how can a town with such a pretty name be anything other than lovely?

Beware of lizards.
They don't warn you of the snakes.

Given the return journey was uphill most of the way - and Tim was running - to finish in 2 hours 18 minutes was pretty damn awesome. The coffee and chocoate chip muffin got me back up the lovely swoopy single/4WD track (with a lot of vocal grunting and moaning...but I got there, without hopping off and walking, tempting as it was. A great sense of achievement and therefore worth the pain...well, that's what I tell myself through the curtain of sweat anyway).

Fauna highlight of the day: a baby snake! So young it couldn't even slither, so it pretty much bounced off to the side of the road! Cute as hell! It did make me wonder where big fat mamma snake was lurking though, so we scuttled past pretty quickly.

On our return to camp  we had a quick dip in the creek. It was a really hot day, so we were covered in sweaty salty ick. The creek was lovely and cool and full of wriggly tadpoles! We drove back into Laura to stay at its caravan park for a few nights,stopping in at a bakery in Stony Creek for a Cornish pastie!

The caravan park is full of very chatty people and we've made some new acquaintances, some we might come back to paddle with at the weekend! Yay!

Ride

Time (hr:min:sec): 1:15:00

Speed (kph):

Distance (km): 23

Run

Time (hr:min:sec): 2:18:00

Speed (kph):

Distance (km): 23

Go Team Mawson!

Day 38. Willow Dam Road to Wirrabarra Forest

Lily's bit:

Oh it was SO good to be out on the trail as an active participant! I rode while Tim ran - for 23k - then picked up his bike, then both rode the 23k back to camp. 46k! I rode 46k! It felt great. My foot was fine, in fact even walking it was fine (mind you, I only walked about 100 metres all day). And the scenery was magnificent (photos should say it all, I think). We noticed an odd lack of kangaroos but saw some lovely parrots (including the now easily-identified Regent parrot) and a lot of sheep. AND our first snake together! Smaller than the one I'd seen, but slithery and scary nonetheless. Well-spotted by me, too, I might add. Looked rather like a stick it did

Ride

Time (hr:min:sec): 1:40:00

Speed (kph):

Distance (km): 23

Run

Time (hr:min:sec): 3:10:00

Speed (kph):

Distance (km): 23

Dream a little dream

Camping at the Melrose Showgrounds.
Some map studying pre-run.

Day 37. Melrose to Willow Dam Road

Lily's bit:

I had a strange dream last night. I was in a place - it was my place, but it wasn't a house or room or any kind of building. It wasn't outside even. It was just my place. A bat kept visiting me and stayed for longer and longer periods of time. I was getting really irritated by it. Why are you here? What do you want? Of course, being a bat, there was no answer. It just stayed with me. It landed on my arm a few times. One time, I was sick of it and swatted it away. I gave it a pretty good wallop, but it came back anyway. Eventually, I relaxed a bit and grew to accept the bat was part of my life. At the end of the dream, I was shown a video of me hitting the bat. I'd broken its nose. It had crawled into a corner and waited until I'd calmed down and it had recovered then it came back and sat beside me again. Its forgiveness of me was really humbling and I felt guilt and shame for what I'd done. So, that was me and the bat. Companions from then on. The End. Weird, huh? If anyone wants a go at analysing that one, feel free to drop me a line!

Wonder why it's called Willow Dam Road?

I was a bit affected by the dream in the morning. It was pretty vivid. But I pulled myself together and we got Tim off on the trail again. We decided today he would do 20ks with no support. That way, I could have a few hours at the showgrounds to do some yoga and whatever else I wanted to do. I ended up having a lovely text chat with a friend and doing a spot of yoga on the grass. I got bitten on the finger by an ant during a salute to the sun, but it was a great and much needed session. I intended to meditate a bit on what my dream might mean, but with the flies, the music from the campers next to us and the bitey ants, there wasn't much in the way of meditative space!

I picked Tim up after a lovely drive through a few small towns. This part of South Australia is amazingly beautiful. It is very green at the moment - rolling hills, horses in paddocks, bales of hay golden in the sun. I can't believe it's so sparsely populated. Why doesn't everyone live here??!

Why thank you, Port Germein.

I fancied seeing the seaside, at Port Germein, given we were only twenty kms away and drove through some pretty stunning gorges to get there. Port Germein boasts the longest wooden jetty in Australia. Just over 1.5kms of wooden jetty, in fact! So (of course) we were obliged to walk it. There were a few dedicated fisher people at the end, where the water very suddenly becomes deep, some huge discarded fish heads and some very huge sea eagles doing a great job of riding the wind. We drove to Port Pirie, a much, much larger town, which was sort of interesting in an ugly port town sort of a way. Great looking library, though. And the motel has a honeymoon suite. Just in case you were insane enough to spend your honeymoon in Port Pirie.

The biggest wooden
jetty in Australia.

We're camped for the night in a valley at Wirrabarra Forest. $3 each a night! That's a bargain for the use of a toilet, that is! It's a big forest, too. We just went for a walk to the top of a hill to watch the sun go down and we'll run and ride out of here tomorrow morning. I've decided to join Tim for the day! I'm going to ride my bike with him while he runs and we'll pick up his bike that we left about 20k away and ride back together. I'm really looking forward to being an active member of Team Mawson again! My heel seems to be doing better today, which is great news after yesterday's bike ride, so I'm feeling fairly confident I'll be running again in a week! Yay!

PS Happy birthday Robby Rob Face!

Underneath. Pretty.

Run

Time (hr:min:sec): 2:23:34

Speed (kph):

Distance (km): 20.54

Seriously. Check out 70's dude.

Melrose...Place to be

Day 36. Wilmington to Melrose part 2

Yay for community bike rides! Had a LOVELY day! There were 88 people (who signed up) on the track. We rode most of the way with a great guy called Tony, a sort-of local who'd moved from Melrose to Adelaide 20 years ago but still has family here. We had some good chats and I really appreciated his honesty facing some of the stomach-churning downhill bits today! It was a pretty easy ride for the most part - the trail follows an old railway track, so is mainly flat - but they've dropped in some crazy ramps with this particular one being practically vertical! It had also been raining, of course, so it was muddy as. And there were quite a few little kids on the ride, which were a bit tricky to negotiate. But all up, I was so excited by the ride, I bought the t-shirt!

My heel held up, only twinging on the rare uphill bits and doesn't hurt any more than normal tonight, so yay to that (sort of!).

Other than that, Tim did another run in the afternoon, finishing off the Wilmington to Melrose bit; a yummy dinner at the pub again (GREAT pub, chef turns out to double as the caretaker of the showgrounds - big cheery wave to us from the kitchen. Love this town) and home to the van and a field full of partying campers!

We're both pretty tempted to stay here another day. Do the Mt Remarkable hike (there's a camp site at the top...we've got a tent...I'd love to hike up there and stay the night), some of the other mountain bike trails, wineries, galleries... But the lure of the Mawson is calling and we're both also feeling like it's good to keep moving. Time works really differently at the moment. It's hard to believe its only been a month since we started the Mawson. It really could be 6, I've lost all sense of time. So to spend 2 days in a place feels like a week. Weird. Anyway. I'd love to come back to Melrose and if you ever get chance, get up here!

Laughing at farts: I blame my mother.

Day 35. Wilmington to Melrose

Tim's bit:

Last night's camp site at Wilmington.
Lily is trapped inside the hammock.

I had a bad night's sleep. At first I couldn't get to sleep because I hadn't stretched and my legs, in particular, were still tight and because I was frustrated about not doing enough writing, about me being worried about not doing enough writing etc. Stupid stuff that happens when I'm already tired... Then this morning I woke up from a dream which had three parts. In the first part, my brother died. In the second, I was working in a role where I was supposed to know something about plants. I was embarrassed by a nine year old boy who answered a question I patronisingly asked him astoundingly well, then asked me questions which revealed just how little I knew and that I had was utterly out of my depth. Then I was working on a day when everybody was required (it felt like Solo Day at Clunes) and I knew I wasn't capable both because my brother had died and because I didn't know what I was doing. I wanted to lie down and sleep, but knew I couldn't get compassionate leave or anything like that because everyone was required. I woke up thinking that today would be a good day to have off.

More yummy flesh for the man-eating hammock

But then I started moving, and a storm started rolling in, and I thought about the "guidebooks" I've been reading. Maybe guidebooks is the wrong word. Anyway, I've been reading a couple of "how-to" books on writing and running recently, and every book I've ever read on writing says you should write every day. Even if it's just one sentence, a fragment of an idea, a cool phrase, a mishmash of two half-thougts on a scrap of paper: write something. A book on running I read recently said, if you don't feel like running, just do a fifteen minute run. If, after fifteen minutes, you still don't want to run, fine. Stop. But just go out and see. So I decided to get out and have a trot.

The idea of running in a storm seemed like a good one. It got me going, at least, but the storm never really burst while I was still running.

Lily was a great support crew, again. Once we'd decided that the blister treatment she did yesterday had worked, she was into writing the course out and getting us going. I don't know if many people have ever seen this side of Lily: some may know that she laughs when people fart, but I now know that she also laughs when, while pinching and lancing a blister on the bottom of my foot, she gets a spit of blister-juice first on her chest and then on her cheek! There's no hesitation or "ew gross" just straight "how funny is that?!" laughter. Amazing.

We were visited by possums in the night. Cute but stinky.

Anyway, run was good and flat. Tired legs but cruising along slowly, thinking that I was aiming to cover about 29kms today. Stopping every 7kms for a drink and a catch-up seems to work a treat. 35-40 minutes seems like a nice amount of time for a solo jog. Repeat times four and the day is done. Excpet that after 14kms, exactly the same scenario as yesterday. Blister's back. So we decided to stop for the morning, treat it, and maybe come back in the afternoon. I felt okay about having got out and done something (my 15 minutes plus a bit) anyway.

I jumped in the van and we headed into Melrose, which is lovely! It has a great feel and a very happy mountain biking scene. We stopped in at a cool cafe (Bluey Blunstone Blacksmiths Cafe and B'n'B) then went up to check out the mountain bike shop. It was the nicest looking shop I have seen in South Australia, with cool gear and a great atmosphere. Friends were in there with pets and chats and hugs were being passed around while the lady came over to serve us. So we signed up for a community ride tomorrow, which follows the Rail Trail from Wilmington to Melrose, which will be opened as a bike trail tomorrow! So it'll be us and about 40 locals riding 23kms (or something like that, which is way shorter than the 42 boring dirt road kms of the Mawson!) and then we'll have a barbecue in the town park, called Paradise Park.

The courtyard of the Bluey Blunstone Blacksmith's Cafe.
An old blacksmith's, funnily enough formerly owned
by a chap called Bluey Blunstone.

After that, we quickly checked out a bit of town, including a swing bridge, which Tim made a pathetic attempt at riding over. But all in good fun. And then back to the Showgrounds where we're camped, to watch an amazing storm gather itself up and come over the top of Mt Remarkable. Dinner tonight will be back in town, then hopefully a better night's sleep, and tomorrow we'll see what happens!

Lily's bit:

So we've signed up for a ride tomorrow, which sort of goes against my 'stop doing stuff and fix yo foot, Lilsta' mantra. But it sounds like a wicked cool thing to do! It'll be ace meeting and riding with new people (although, I'm sure they don't think they're particularly new!).  There does seem to be a great crew of bikey-types in town.

Looking relaxed, feeling hungry,
out the back of the BBB Cafe

This afternoon's storm has been mostly low rumbles with a few distant flashes of lightening. We had fun trying to put up a tarp and watch it flap around madly in the wind. I bravely ventured over to the bathroom just as the storm was breaking and hobbled back to the van as quickly as I could. Which seems to have made my heel hurt quite a lot. Twit! But we're tucked up inside now. The wind's all windy and a second big storm cloud has just popped its head over the mountain. We'll snuggle up here for a few more hours and then go check out the pub. I'm hoping there will be something other than chips and salad on the menu! And maybe we can meet a few more locals or other travelling types. It feels like the kind of place where the kind of people I might want to meet might be hanging out, anyway!

Melrose only has a population of 431, yet has two pubs, a primary school and kindy, some great looking tennis courts and a bowling green, a couple of cafes, an awesome bike shop and a few other gift-type shops. I can't help but compare it to Clunes. There is something about a small community like this that I'm attracted to. People are more happily reliant on others: for conversation, friendship, child care. Exchanging ideas, food, tips on making pottery. Welcoming outsiders. Putting their heads together to find ways to improve the heart of the place (Booktown, the Melrose Fat Tyre Festival...). It's pretty cool to rock up in a town and not two hours later have a local invite you to their community ride, anyway!

Tim attempting to ride the swaying swing bridge

Run

Time (hr:min:sec): 1:32:20

Speed (kph): 9.18

Distance (km): 14.13

Watching the storm clouds appearing
from behind the mountain. Pretty cool.