May 22, 2024
Day 19: Greenvale to Valley of Lagoons road
I woke this morning to the sound of voices, which I was annoyed about until I realised that that meant the pub was open and serving breakfast. It also meant there were toilets available. And it had been a dry night so there was very little condensation on the tents.
There was only one guy serving and cooking so I got an iced coffee instead of making him make one but my breakfast was really good.
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After affixing all our water to our bikes, we rode back out of Greenvale the way we’d come and turned onto the dirt road.
It has these grid type bridges, which is not quite an accurate description, because it is just a grid as a bridge.
The first few ks were pretty corrugated but we persevered to get to the site of the transmission build which I’m pretty sure is the Kidston transmission connection which is why there’s so many UGL trucks in Greenvale.
After that, it wasn’t as bad mostly. Or rather the sections of corrugating were interspersed with alright if rocky road.
It wasn’t built on a railway alignment though so there were some hills to climb and some precipitous gullies to get down into and back out of.
After about 30k we stopped in a nice dry creek bed with granite boulders to lean on for morning tea and watched a bunch of indigenous rangers and fire trucks drive across the grid type bridge.
Unfortunately after only about 3 more kilometres we came to this.
Obviously we had to stop for a swim underneath the weir. It was quite deep and cold and beautiful.
Refreshed, we rode on, now out of the hills and mostly in floodplain country.
The kangaroo grass was very tall and red and I saw three emus run across the road in front of me. We stopped for lunch under a tree about 5k from the bitumen because it would be quieter, and there was no other features on the plains. We rode past Conjuboy station which had a surprisingly fast flowing creek with conjuboy in it and then hit the bitumen.
It was a slog from there, gently uphill and with a bit of a headwind. There wasn’t much traffic though. There also wasn’t too much to look at except this nice windmill.
We’ve stopped at a gravel pit at the junction of the valley of lagoons road, which is nice enough except the mosquitoes are bad. The national trail is about 60k east but by now it’s quicker to keep heading up the main road to Mt Garnet. There’ll be a hill in the morning though to take us up to about 900m above sea level so we’ll fill up on dehydrated risotto tonight.
Today's ride: 74 km (46 miles)
Total: 1,345 km (835 miles)
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