July 20, 2015
Look, horses!: No Chris, that's a donkey
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We spent the night in the woods next to a hollowed out tree, and fortunately it wasn’t as cold as the previous night had been. After taking our time packing things up we resumed cycling and the horse-spotting game, nicely poised at 33-30 to me, could restart. Unfortunately it wasn’t a good day for me on this front. In fact my only real participation all morning was in spotting a very impressive horse shaped mailbox. Confident that this must mean that the home owners kept horses I declared “Horses, there are horses in the back yard, just through there, look! Horses!” Only for Dea to respond, with frustrating correctness; “No Chris, that’s a donkey, and two llamas.”
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We reached the small town of Moe (pronounced Moey) where we lost half the day in the library and at the supermarket and buying fish and chips. As we waited outside the chip shop for our order to be ready we met a group of aboriginals, at least one of whom was very drunk in the middle of the afternoon. They were quite friendly towards us but it is such a sad situation in Australia, the plight of the aborigines, ostracised in their own lands as they are. So often groups of them could be seen hanging around town centres during the daytime as it is hard for them to find employment and to adapt to the imported western way of life, with alcoholism and drug addictions common. There remains such a big divide between Australians of European descent and aborigines, and plenty of outright racism, that sadly it is not easy to imagine there will ever be a satisfactory solution.
Anyway, sorry to be so depressing. How about, on a lighter note, we check out the allergen advice on our mixed nuts:
It was quite a warm afternoon and it was so nice to lie in the sun on the grass of a park that the day quickly got away from us. We only had enough time to take another rail trail a few kilometres out the other side of Moe, and then set up our tent. It would have been quite a nice spot, except for the noise of a large power station that loomed over us from nearby. Unfortunately my stove had stopped working and despite my best efforts to fix it with a pair of scissors, it appeared to be beyond saving, so we were going to have to get used to eating sandwiches for dinner. That didn’t matter, we had each other, and we had our adventure, and even though I was now 44-25 behind in the horse spotting competition I had to agree that everything was just fine in my life right now.
Today's ride: 51 km (32 miles)
Total: 45,043 km (27,972 miles)
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