Veni, Volvi, Vinci is the correct quote, if I remember my J. Caesar correctly.  I’m pretty sure the first bicycle battalion mastered the the tortoise formation.

And, I agree with Mr Saxby, Graham.  Nice to see your thoughts and thought provoking questions in these parts.

Or was it When-'e, Weedy, Wiki?  (Enuf already! Please make it stop! I've had a word with my younger self, advising against bad puns in any language. Seems that advice was ignored :(  'Tis a sickness, I admit, but that's no reason to continue with it.)

Have to believe, tho', that there'd have been no conquest involved if he'd simply imagined & then built a bike (the Romans could build just about anything) and gone for a ride cross-country.

John another piece of advice I should have given my younger self is stop procrastinating and get out there and cycle tour without postponements. So of course without that advice, I’ve postponed a ride from Canberra to Perth from last month to late March or early April next year. 

A fellow Thorn owner is very keen to ride with me which will help me stick to plan this time. So if this works out, unfortunately  I won’t be around on the eastern side of Australia to catch up with you. Rather I’ll be slow baking on The Nullarbor in April 2020.

Illegitimi non carborundum is the only Latin I can recall. It’s been a useful motto at times.:)

Canberra to Perth is a serious bit of bizness, Graham, esp with, er, no trees on the Nullarbor Plain.  (The Latin arises where you least expect it, eh?) (Y'know, when I first read it, hurriedly, I thought it might have been a word from an indigenous language. Then I looked a bit closer and thought, "No way the Romans were here!") Whatever, I'll accept that as a pretty good reason for skipping the hills of the NSW Border Ranges ;)

Enjoy your ride -- I'll look forward to your journal & photos, as always.

Illegitimi non carborundum is good advice indeed.  I first saw it on the masthead of a newspaper in Sudbury, a hard-rock mining town in Northern Ontario.  I find myself repeating it far too frequently, f'rexample when SUV drivers try to kill me.

Cheers,  J.

PS:  How many Thorns in 'Straya? Would your companion be Il Padrone/Syd W/Ian from Darwin/Sam from Newcastle?

John Thorn Bikes, unlike bike tyre puncturing thorns on the Nullarbor, are fairly scarce in Australia.  I've only seen two other Thorn bikes in Canberra, and just yesterday a young guy commented on my Thorn and said he's brought a Thorn Nomad back to Canberra from England. The fellow who is likely to ride to Perth me is a Canberran and a Thorn Nomad owner. His name is Ian, but he's not from Darwin. 

Unlike me, Ian and his wife are a real cycle touring expeditioners and adventurers. They literally rode out of the St John St Cycle shop in Somerset and kept riding until they reached Singapore via Turkey, Iran, the Stans and China and SE Asia. That was six years ago.  This year he and his yellow Thorn Nomad returned to the Stans and rode some impossibly high country on tracks that even goats refuse to use.

Ian's advice to his younger self seems to have been, "Plans are over rated. Just get out there and do it!"  

Wow!   A Nomadic pair indeed.   Nice to have that Thorn connection.  Those bikes are even more scarce here in Eastern Ontario than in Canberra -- I've never seen one east of Oregon, come to think of it.

The majority of the times I've ever faced any kind of real danger have been at home.

I have:

1. Been in a freak chemical explosion that left me permanently handicapped. This happened at the swimming pool where I was working as a summer lifeguard while in college.
2. Had my boss attempt to hold my passport for ransom as part of contract renegotiation.
3. Walked into a piece of exposed metal bracket sticking out from a bench, hitting myself in the center of the nerve damaged area (see above), and gotten myself so thoroughly into shock that I lost huge blocks of time and kept swimming in and out of conscious. This happened twenty minutes before going out to dinner with new coworkers and immediately after a short local tour. (I would swim up to consiciousness, be sure the confusion was from hitting my head, get angry at myself for my habit of not wearing a helmet other than on training rides, realize I was wearing a dress, and get even more confused.)
4. Had oxygen deprivation to the point of slurred speech, overconfidence, and blackout drunk levels of gait ataxia. This happened at work (work is apparently not a good place for me) and while it was also technically while traveling, it was in a "safe" environment that went to what is not considered to actually be "real" high altitude.
5. Had my camera, camera bag, purse, and passport stolen. This happened in my bedroom because a sneak thief came in while I was sleeping.
6. Had my apartment raided by the Anti-Drug Smuggling Task Force, been arrested, and spent two days in custody of the Chinese police. This happened because someone ha-ha-ha thought it was super funny to mail a bunch of drugs to me. Even if a certain person who stalks my posts (Hi Neil!) claims to have had nothing to do it, the dates of the targeting and other information related to the Incident neatly lines up with his unfounded public accusations about me so however uninvolved he may have been, it still happened because of him.

Worst thing that's happened on tour has been some wet socks or sore muscles. Recent water damage to my laptop is (or will be) covered by Lenovo. 

During one of the only occasions where I've let the Chinese police win a round of "you can't stay here", the county level authorities had already said "just let her stay wherever she wants, it's fine" and the local police wouldn't budge an inch.

Because I'm female and traveling alone.

And the local truck stop hotels were nasty.