April 5, 2016
Finally meeting some people: And some birds
I woke up next to the dead-end forest side road that I'd taken to find a good camping spot and as I packed up my things I noticed two kangaroos jump past. As I watched the marsupials disappear into the trees I thought to myself, correctly as it turned out, that they might very well be the last kangaroos I'd see for a while. This was the last absolutely full day of cycling before reaching Sydney, and I had a goal of getting to Gosford by nightfall. Dea and I had camped in Gosford on our first night out from Sydney, and so I knew if I could get to it I'd be for sure able to make my destination the next day.
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After riding for a while I reached a small town and stopped for breakfast in a park. I had to hand it to Australia, one thing they did very well were public parks. One could be almost guaranteed in every small town, complete with picnic tables, public toilets, and very often a free-to-use electric barbeque. This one was particularly nice, with a river circling around three sides of it. And it had an interesting attraction too – the largest duck I'd ever seen. This duck was absolutely obese. I'd never seen such a thing. It waddled around and I wondered how its legs could take the weight. Then it headed for the water and I made a little bet with myself that it would surely sink, yet somehow it did not.
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Still wondering how such a duck came to exist I continued my ride now on a remote gravel road which was both pleasantly wonderful and wonderfully pleasant. Thinking things couldn't get much better than that I was startled by the sight of a touring cyclist coming up in my rear-view mirror. Well, he wasn't on a tour, but he had some slightly-filled panniers, and a bike that was obviously set up for the job. His name was Jim, I soon discovered, and he lived near here but was out for a training ride. Soon he planned to cycle from Cape York, at the top of the country, back down to Brisbane, with a small group. We were going the same way now for the next ten or fifteen kilometres and we rode it together. Goodness it wasn't half nice. Jim seemed a hell of a good chap and we talked a lot about bikes and bike trips and things. Riding along chatting with him was really wonderful and especially so as I realised that I'd hardly spoken to anyone at all in the last five days
After taking a break with Jim at one of those aforementioned parks we went our separate ways. He was doing a loop back home, I was continuing on my way to Gosford. I retraced the roads that I already knew and before too long I was arriving into Gosford. I'd made it with plenty of time to spare and, also already knowing where I was going to camp, I could relax for a few hours. It helped that Gosford had kindly installed wifi in their public parks, and so I sat on a bench and flipped open my laptop. I was keen to follow Dea's progress. Having successfully cycled up to her goal of Yeppoon, she was now enjoying the great pleasure of a 36 hour bus journey. By now she was about 24 hours into it and looking forward to a second night of discomfort. We were just a day away from being reunited.
And as if meeting Jim wasn't enough, incredibly I was to have more interactions with human beings too. First up was a drunk, who I'd noticed staggering down the path close to me. He could barely stand and so it was with some disappointment that he clocked onto me.
“Where are you from?” he stammered.
“England.”
He looked puzzled for a moment and then repeated, “Where are you from?”
“England.”
His breath reeked of booze as he stood over me. He seemed unpredictable and I was nervous of having my laptop out. He asked me again where I was from and, having thought I'd already covered that in my first two answers, I got up and packed my laptop away. For this I got a lecture about how rude I was from the drunk. “You're rude. You know what you are. You're rude. Look at me. You're rude. Where are you from?”
I left hastily and headed down to the bay area of town. There were places to sit here too, and I made myself comfortable with a great view of the sun setting over the water and cooked some dinner. This, however, didn't go very well. The last of my gas ran out when I was just half-way through cooking and the food was barely edible. I decided to give most of it to the seagulls. Although interestingly there was one particularly aggressive alpha male that would do everything he could to be the only one getting any. There must have been at least thirty other birds besides him, but he stood in the middle and went mad squawking and chasing the others if any of them tried to get any. Who knew a seagull could be so protective over some severely undercooked Mexican rice?
Behind me while all this was going on, hundreds of cars went past on the busy main road. So many of them would have been going home from another day at work and I didn't give much thought to it. Rarely would I have any direct interaction with anyone on their daily commute – the busyness of their business bearing little commonality with my own 'hanging in the park with the drunks and the seagulls' routine. But this day was different because a man in a suit came striding towards me. He'd seen me and stopped to come and talk with me. At first as he approached his blue shirt and appearance reminded me of the council workers in Surfers Paradise that had occasionally given us grief for not obeying the rules, and I wondered if perhaps giving spicy rice to seabirds was an offence here. But then the man, fifty something, slightly overweight, grey hair, chubby face, smiled at me and asked permission to ask me about my trip, because he wanted to do something similar.
I liked very much that he asked permission to ask. I thought it was better than simply launching straight in with a question that I might have had no interest in answering, and so I invited him to sit with me. I was glad that I did, as he had an interesting and thought-provoking story to share with me. He told me, in a surprisingly cheerful manner, that he had recently been diagnosed with a disease that was, in his words, “not exactly terminal, but in five or ten years I'll be like this” at which point he did a rather politically incorrect (for anyone except The Donald) impression of a person suffering a degenerative condition. “If I'm going to do this, I need to do it now. So I've handed in my notice and I want to go and ride a bike around the world.”
Grant asked me a lot of questions about cycle touring, and of course I responded as best I could. He said he wished he'd done something like this when he was younger. I urged him to make it happen now. He told me that he would, he had nothing to stop him. He had no kids and he was finalising a divorce from his wife, a process he described as amicable. “She doesn't want to go with me. She's very into her career. Well, we both were. She wants to do this type of thing when she retires. Well, I won't be able to then. It'll be too late for me then. So it's thanks for the memories and I love you, but goodbye.” It was one of the saddest things I'd ever heard. But Grant didn't seem too fazed by his wife's indifference to the idea. He was enthused by our conversation and he left beaming at the thought of the adventures he still had ahead of him. At least he wasn't going to wait until it was too late.
Today's ride: 82 km (51 miles)
Total: 48,518 km (30,130 miles)
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