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