April 14, 2023
The Central West Cycle Trail Day 1
Navigation Not Required
I spent the last two-ish years bouncing around the southern half of Australia, waiting for the right time to go on a bicycle tour. Pulled in all directions by the demands of the sandwich generation, at some point Roger and I realised that the time would never come: what we had to do was find the time or make the available time work as best it could.
We stopped thinking about a big bicycle tour and started thinking about how to fit the tour into the every day, particularly when our every day seemed to cover a sizeable chunk of southern and eastern Australia and involve an alarming number of long distance road trips.
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The next big drive would take us through New South Wales (NSW) on our way from South Australia to Queensland, and we looked at NSW with fresh eyes, seeing all kinds of possibilities.
Due to some legislative glitches, NSW had been unable to build rail trails on its disused rail lines, so rail trail opportunities in NSW were for a long time quite limited, and everyone tended to zoom right through NSW on the way to the rail trails in Victoria. Cycling groups in NSW gazed enviously over the border at all the people cycling, walking, and riding horses on the rail trails in Victoria. Fading rural towns in NSW gazed jealously over the border at all the people spending money in rural towns while they cycled, walked, and rode their horses on the rail trails. Both groups put their heads together and before you could say "quiet gravel roads" the Central West Cycle Trail (CWCT) was born.
As luck and geography would have it, the CWCT lay kinda-sorta on our route from Adelaide to Sydney. Neither Roger nor I were purists and he struggled with a back injury which appeared to be aggravated by too much cycling, so the decision was made to attempt the Good-Enough Central West Cycle Tour: we would tag-team and ride half each, and while we were at it we would skip any nasty bits with lots of trucks and fast traffic (which hopefully wasn't much). And we would use the car to carry our stuff and facilitate the tag-teaming.
We started off in Wellington, on the banks of the Macquarie River, coughing up an extra $5 for the privilege of a riverside site. Roger had a vested interest in being rescued should his back give out, so he graciously opted to ride the first (all uphill) leg.
I waved him off and had enough time for a peaceful cup of coffee in the sun back at camp before heading out to collect him.
Roger waited proudly at the top of the hill, claiming an uncontested King Of the Mountain. As it turned out the hill wasn't as steep on land as it looked on paper, and he was very pleased with himself for having walked only one little bit, and with no complaints at all from his back
In no time at all I had waved him goodbye and off I went on my own (all downhill, ha!) leg of the ride. The bitumen soon turned to smooth gravel, open grassland rolled past, granite boulders dotted artistically about and fluffy sheep gamboling in the paddocks. There were even lambs. I was very happy.
The creek crossings contained a polite amount of water, enough to be fun but not enough to stop me riding through.
I had lunch beside the road above a gurgling creek. A butterfly landed on my hand and probed unsuccessfully for nectar. A kangaroo hopped up the road and got quite a fright to see me sitting there, such that he bounced away straight into a fence, fell on the ground, got up in a bamboozled hurry, and hopped back the way he had come.
Rural NSW slid by on either side of my quiet little track. Sheep and cattle, spooked by my unexpected appearance, ran away. I could afford not to think about where I was going, as I was required to make only two navigational decisions in the whole riding day.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end. My second Nav Dec spat me out onto Gorries Lane.It was rough and rocky and started with a hill which was a bit rude after all that downhill, and I'm not too proud to admit that I walked up it.
"I'll be in Goolma soon," I texted to Roger. "I'll have a lemon squash at the pub, please."
I looked forward to that lemon squash for five rocky kilometers.
The only traffic of the day passed me in Gorries Lane: Farmer Joe with a ute full of sheep, going every bit as slowly as me which was testament to the roughness of the road.
The pub in Goolma was shut. A sign on the door, posted in early 2020, informed me that it would open after Covid settled down. Somehow I don't think that happened, and my dreams of lemon squash went unmet.
Bereft of lemon squash, we drove home through paddocks of burning stubble.
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A whole new clutch of grey nomads had moved into the caravan park, but they were all tucked up snug in their caravans so we had the camp kitchen to ourselves. We sat down to plan the next day as the sun slowly set over the river and ground parrots, overlooked by cockatoos, squabbled in the grass.
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Today's ride: 24 km (15 miles)
Total: 101 km (63 miles)
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