August 23, 2015
Stupid women: And stunning scenery
Thankfully only two trains passed all night, although on both occasions it was a little terrifying to be woken up by such an almighty noise, only half aware of what was going on. Pleased to survive through until morning we enjoyed a nice sunrise whilst I made us beans on toast for breakfast with the new stove. After enjoying this culinary delight Dea said to me, with a completely straight face and with absolute sincerity: “Thank you for teaching me how to make beans on toast.” I’d literally never felt so proud of my cooking skills.
As with so many of the days in this journal about cycling, we began to cycle. I was a little behind Dea and after just two kilometres a car passed me and stopped. Contained within the interior of this vehicle there was a woman, and this woman leaned out of her window and greeted me pleasantly enough. She told me that she had seen us the previous night. “I saw you last night” were, I believe, her exact words. Then she went a bit weird, and asked “Do you need somewhere to camp?” Now, this would have been a very logical question had she stopped and asked it when she’d seen us the previous evening, when we did indeed need somewhere to camp, preferably a little further from the train tracks, but coming now it was a little late, or a little early. “Oh not really,” I said, “we’d better do a few hours of cycling, else we’ll never get anywhere.” But the woman ignored me, and proceeded to tell me all about a good camping spot that was only six kilometres away with such sincerity that it was really all I could do to stop myself from grabbing her by the lapels and screaming “It’s eight thirty in the bloody morning you stupid woman!”
Luckily she drove off quickly and my nerves were soon calmed by an extremely pleasant morning of cycling. Despite overcast skies the scenery was delightful. A winding road took us over yellow hills dotted with trees and kangaroos. With the road being very quiet Dea and I resumed our kangaroo spotting game, a game which we had restarted after I’d won the last one by getting to a hundred. In the new game Dea had built up an impressive 39-26 lead, doing a fantastic job of spotting the marsupials leaping about the landscape. Then the paved road ended and we cycled on gravel roads which were even more adventurous and I thought about how, in all honesty, the east of Australia had provided as lovely a few weeks cycling as I’d experienced anywhere in the whole world.
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The day wore on. It started to get late. We returned towards civilization and were back on a busier paved road and, once again, our options for camping were limited by fences that lined both sides of the road. We needed to find somewhere before dark and I rushed onwards as the light was just beginning to fade. I was sure we would find somewhere, but we needed to be quick. Then another car pulled alongside me and, as with the start of our day, a very stupid woman took it upon herself to speak to me.
In fact there were two women in this car and I have to say that they really put the woman who’d asked if we needed somewhere to camp at eight thirty in the morning to shame in the stupidity stakes. In actual fact I felt like apologising to that woman now that we actually did need somewhere to camp in a hurry. I mean, if we’d only stopped where she’d suggested we wouldn’t be in this mess, and we’d never have had to meet the new stupid women, one of whom was calling out to me from the window: “You don’t want to be cycling on this road after dark! Where are you going?”
I tried to fob her off by merely stating that I was well aware that we didn’t want to be cycling on this road after dark and that we were looking for somewhere to camp, but in response she shouted, “Hang on, I’ll park up there and we can have a bit of a yarn.”
A bit of a yarn was, ironically, the one thing that I didn’t want to have with these women. Time was ticking, daylight was limited, and these women wanted to have a bit of a yarn? They pulled over and got out and of course I had to stop to be polite, with Dea pulling in just behind.
“Now you don’t want to be cycling on this road after dark.” The women repeated. “Where are you going?”
I told them again that we just needed to hurry and find somewhere to pitch our tent. This unfortunately only encouraged one of the women and, with the light fading by the second, she entered into a rather long monologue: “Oh, let’s think. You’ll go along here, down the hill, around the bend, a few kilometres more, past our place, over a bridge, then the tennis courts. Well I don’t know where you can camp but you don’t want to be cycling after dark. Not on this road. So down here, there’s a bend, and a few kilometres, you’ll go past our place, then there’s a bridge, no, nowhere to camp, maybe at the tennis courts. But I don’t know, because you don’t have much time. Now, let’s think. You don’t want to be cycling on this road after dark. You’ll go along here, down the hill, past our place-”
At this stage I said thank you and simply cycled off. Enough was enough. I really wanted to grab her by the lapels, but it was about to get dark and, as I think she’d mentioned, we didn’t want to be cycling after dark.
Not one hundred yards up the road we found a perfect camping spot.
Today's ride: 61 km (38 miles)
Total: 46,526 km (28,893 miles)
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