May 17, 2024
Day 14: Burdekin Dam to Ravenswood
Today we did what we should have done yesterday and hustled to get out of camp before 8.
The day starts with a screaming downhill to another part of the dam wall, I guess because it’s not a valley hemmed in by mountains they had to build several walls to keep the water in. I thought about if there was anything I would have climbed that hill for had I realised I forgot it but I’m just not sure there is.
The problem with starting with a downhill is that the uphill seems even slower but eventually we got up to a lookout to appreciate the scale of the dam in full daylight. the photo doesn’t really do it justice.
After the lookout, we rode along a floodplain, underneath another huge wall that went for several kilometres, and the country evened out a bit.
This is all a bitumen road so it was much quicker than yesterday as our momentum can carry us up the other side of creeks much better, and we roll much quicker.
We got 40k before stopping for smoko underneath some roadside trees. We were mostly in the hilly country today with less visibility.
We made it another 20k then stopped for lunch in a creek bed that is a national trail campsite next to some scungy water but at least the sand was comfortable for a small rest. It was difficult to access with very limited bike parking though.
Gabby was struggling, with butt rash problems but we inches closer to Ravenswood and then got incontrovertible evidence we were close.
We rode into town, only to realise that the caravan park we’d booked was back on the dam road. So we stopped for a beer at the Railway Hotel first. It is a huge pub, incredible in a town the size of Ravenswood but apparently it had a gold boom around the turn of the 20th century and some buildings survive. The current massive mine doesn’t seem to be generating comparable wealth, or at least people aren’t spending it on building new pubs.
I’m not sure they’re spending it on drinking at the existing pubs either cause the publican showed us card tricks that indicated he had way too much time on his hands.
We then retraced our path to the Top Camp roadhouse and caravan park, where Gabby booked into a cabin and I set up on the quite nice lawn. They have free washing machines and very nice showers. They were also running a Friday afternoon sausage sizzle for the caravan park guests so we didn’t even have to ride back into town for dinner!
Today's ride: 80 km (50 miles)
Total: 983 km (610 miles)
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