There’s an interesting market held every Sunday in a car-park at the Oakleigh shops; this morning Jo and I wandered over after breakfast for a poke about. Second-hand books, masses of old electrical junk, pot plants and clothes… and a couple of dodgy young Asian guys selling pirate DVDs. I joked about the $20000 fine for selling them with another guy near me, he laughed and pushed past to get his hands on the latest releases… Five minutes later at the other end of he markets there were two police officers interviewing another DVD seller, and packing up their boxes of disks. Glanced over my shoulder and the first guys had vanished, only an empty table showing where they’d been. The Oakleigh Rotary don’t seem to care, so long as they get their $10 a stall they don’t care what you sell… they certainly don’t do anything about stopping it!
Home for lunch, and round two of attacking the garden. I’m sure glad we didn’t buy a bigger garden! Go away for two weekends and it goes feral, knee high grass and a potato vine threatening to climb from the fence in through the front door.
Late in the afternoon it was tandem time again — a leisurely ride along bike tracks in the general direction of Jells Park. We should have known better, bike tracks are hard enough to navigate on a normal bicycle, on the tandem they are well-nigh impassable. Merely finding and staying on the track is a task in itself. When off-road the path vanishes under mud, gravel, into trees and leaves, back onto the roads and it suddenly disappears in the middle of Mount Waverley. Several U-turns, numerous curses, some half-remembered previous attempts and inspired guesswork eventually found our way to the park. Along the way we met another bunch of riders, equally lost and confused. It doesn’t help when you reach a T-intersection to find arrows pointing clearly both left and right, each labelled “bike route”. No indication of which bike route, or where it is going! Then there is the nightmare of the tiny little chicanes, presumably because the council doesn’t want cyclists to ride out onto the road — hard enough to navigate on an ordinary bike, they become major obstacles for a tandem, for anyone with panniers, for a tricycle, a recumbent or anyone towing children in a trailer.
