48.18km / 2:40:28 / 985m / 17.8°C
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way. Beer? Soda pop? Diet Dr Pepper? ⛅
Up the Dean’s Marsh road to Benwerrin, Mt Sabine road for a few km, then endless gravelly descent on Norman track. Sadly what goes down must come up so there’s the long slog back up Pennyroyal rd and Dean’s Marsh road back to the Ridge then 10km back downhill into Lorne
The climb up the Deans Marsh road is a well known quantity, I enjoy the climb, may have even got within reach of 30 minutes on it once long ago, now it tends to be somewhere around 45. Only problem is the traffic to and from Lorne and close passes as motorists refuse to back off and must get past whether there’s oncoming traffic or not. Turning off onto the Mount Sabine road always a quiet relief, even more so this year as there don’t seem to be the clouds of march flies waiting at the corner when you stop.
Norman track was new to me, we’d all ridden in the first 100m of it a year or so back and turned off down Dunse track – less trafficed and more rugged. This year Norman track was well graded, mostly following the power lines down from the ridge and part of one of the newly cleared wide firebreaks in the forest – I’m not sure how useful a 45m clearing would be for a major fire, but it’d have to help in containing something that’s only just starting. Even met a CFA crew sitting around with trucks and machinery on a meal break.
Once down out of the forest the track still descends, just more gently, and through farmland. A huge stack of multi-coloured hay bales looking like a giant pile of marshmallows made me laugh, then later another field that seemed to contain randomly dotted round bales, each with a sheep sheltering on the downwind side.
There seem to be about three roads with Pennyroyal in the name, riding on one and crossing another the gravel was replaced with tarmac for a sudden steep climb, once it leveled out I was almost back to the main road from Deans Marsh to Lorne and in a few minutes was on that road, back in known territory and sadly, the noise and close passes of the high speed traffic back to Lorne. Such a shame that the best parts of the ride were bracketted by the worst.
Riding 390th day in a row, including my ;
Garmin | Strava | ridewithgps
