Picked the wrong day this weekend to go for a ride — too cold and too windy — but the scenery more than made up for it. Inspiration had struck on Friday and we tried to retrace parts of the MAD ride — drive out to Yarra Glen, ride to Healesville, then up Myer’s Creek road to Toolangi and back.
Yarra Glen to Healesville was mostly flat, but with an icy northerly blowing, not really enjoyable. We spent that part of the ride with our eyes glued to the road, trying to spot the Harley keys that a guy driving past said he’d lost along here! Not much chance of finding them, but he looked pretty desperate — crawling along about 100m ahead of us, peering out through the windscreen of his ute. No keys to be found, just the usual variety of road-side rubbish: a shoe, cans and bottles, a nappy dumped on the road, the sleeve of a shirt, a towel, someone’s discarded g-string.
Into the forests near Healesville we were finally out of the wind, the roads busy with traffic for the markets. Around the backstreets and off northwards up Myer’s Creek road, an ambulance screaming off ahead. Suspicions were that it would be one of the many motorcyclists in the area, come to grief somewhere on a corner. Sure enough, when we were a few kilometres out of town, first the ambulances came back at a more sedate pace, then rounding a corner we came upon the tow-truck and police, attempting to haul a downed bike out of the ditch off the end of a bend.
The climb up to Toolangi is about 10km through the forest. I enjoyed it, but for some reason Jo just doesn’t like this hill — says she didn’t like it in 2002 when we rode up it, and still doesn’t like it today. There are towering tree ferns at the side of the road, old Mountain Ash stumps that still have the marks where loggers cut them down in the thirties, a couple of recent tree falls had been sawn through to clear the road — trunks almost 2m thick.
Toolangi General Store provided warming sausage rolls and a much-needed large mug of coffee, then we checked the tourist map before heading along the ridge in the direction of Kinglake. Now that we were up out of the forest the wind had hit again, straight through the clothes and numbing fingers and toes — a minor mutiny and we decided to turn back along a dirt road that we thought circled back around to Toolangi. I guess a better knowledge of the area would have told us that the Toolangi-Dixson’s Creek road would go off through the forest and take us to Dixon’s Creek, but we didn’t know that. It was a great find though, a traffic-free dirt road on the sunny side of the ridge, protected from the wind as it wound around through dry forest and down to the farms and vineyards below. Amazing how different the forest types were on the two sides of the ridge, gone were all the mountain ash and ferns, open dry scrub and stringy-barks in their place.
The one possible drawback of that route was the last few kilometres to Yarra Glen — along the Melba highway. Narrow, noisy, and plenty of traffic, including a couple of caravans being towed by drivers who forget just how much wider they are than their cars. We did get to see all the high end tourism-oriented Yarra Valley wineries from the road, but in the cold there was little incentive to stop and sample anything.
Just on three hours riding and we were back in Yarra Glen for a second warm-up cup of coffee and a determination to find a map once we got home and work out just where we’d managed to go!
