200km of north-central Victoria. Warm weather. 50 cyclists.
Highlights: First major ride on a tandem. The Wineries and Bakeries; Rutherglen is famous for its fortifieds, Beechworth for its bakery.
Low points: The seats on the tandem. Tobacco-addict of a bus driver who couldn’t last the three hour drive from Melbourne to Wangaratta without pulling over “to let you stretch your legs” and then proceeded to chain-smoke three cigarettes. Same driver and same behaviour on the drive back from Milawa to Melbourne
Below is a summary, some of it is repeated in my .
2002-Nov-01: Fri: Prelude
Hurried home from work to change and go and collect the tandem from The Pegasus Crew in Brighton. Our steed for the weekend was an Apollo Elite, identical to the KHS Alite. It even had KHS seats — hideously uncomfortable KHS seats, as we later discovered.
My trial by fire was to ride it home, in jeans and sneakers, at dusk, up Chappel street on a Friday night! It turned out to be a surprisingly easy task, with only one idiot trying to run me over by using the bike lane to overtake a tram.
Second challenge was to get the tandem up the stairs and into the flat, it just fit around the corners, and with my long arms, can be carried by one person. Then it was time to swap pedals and adjust seats — and time for the stupidest decision of the weekend. Rather than go to the effort of swapping seats from our normal bikes, we hopped on and thought that the KHS seats were “all right” and just needed adjusting for height.
2002-Nov-02: Sat: Melbourne — Wangaratta — Rutherglen
2002-Nov-03: Sun: Rutherglen — Beechworth
This morning absolutely everything was covered in red dust — I’ve no idea how much rain fell last night, but it wasn’t enough to remove the dust that came down as well.
After breakfast we tried adjusting the tandem’s seats up and down and back and forth, I managed to make mine bearable, Jo was still very uncomfortable on the back. Note to self — always put your own seat on the bike, regardless of how long it takes!
2002-Nov-04: Mon: Beechworth — Myrtleford
2002-Nov-05: Tue: Myrtleford — Milawa — Melbourne
Fourth day on the tandem and we’re finally starting to get the hang of it — despite the gravel surface of the rail-trail out of Myrtleford being a little narrower and a little looser than I would have liked. Again we wished for a speedo on the flat or gently climbing track, since we seemed to be passing quite a few people with very little effort on our part.
