Thursday 27 Dec 2018

Started out at 5:30 and it was only 15º. Back in Charters Towers I mailed away all my warm clothing. Perhaps I should have kept just one? Oh well. There was only one other camper, they set up in the camping area. I however was camping in the day use area where there is no camping permitted, but it has beautiful picnic tables, so to hell with that! There are no other facilities. Theoretically you need to register to camp here, $5.50 a night, but it isn’t worth it, and although I tried to register from Neil’s the online registration site wasn’t accepting my address or something and I gave up. So it was a free night, as it should have been anyway.

I’m glad I rode to the viewpoint yesterday because the view today isn’t much. Too cloudy, too misty. But there is mobile reception so I was able to upload yesterday’s blog post and have a good long talk with my honey bunny in Costa Rica.

The vegetation is so completely different on top of the Tops, on the east side it is real rain forest.

For a day where you descend off the range there was an amazing amount of uphill today, the most uphill I’ve done to date. And they were all these short miserably steep little bits that were too steep to ride. I can manage up to 8%, a bit more when the road is paved, but these sections were all about 12%. The ride down off the range was steep and rough, but nothing like the other side where Neil drove me up. The east side is only 14% max.

I arrived at Girlie’s station at 3pm, quite a late arrival for what was supposed to be an easy day. Just before I got there a family had arrived for an overnight visit, so we all enjoyed cups of tea and slices of fruitcake, and I felt totally renewed after a nice shower. Then we all helped a bit with dinner preparations, which won’t be served until 7, which is normally my bed time. But tomorrow I’m not going far. I need an easy day. Clive, Michelle and Clare (family) joined us for dinner: delicious corned beef, baked potatoes and veggies, and Girlie’s famous “poison pudding” for dessert. We finished it all off with a fun game of cards.

Today’s totals: 64k 6:30h 1090m+ 1636m-