Tapping out at 1116 kms

Hey all,
An unfortunate note to update you all with. Around 100 km from the end of our tour, I've decided to tap out and train back to Melbourne from Kyneton. We had a bushfire scare in the area last night and, while the rest of the crew is making their way to the next town and back to Melbourne on Thursday, I figured that this is venturing into 'unreasonable craziness' and made the decision to leave.

We were relaxing in a mud brick home a few kilometres out of Kyneton's town centre when someone noticed black smoke off in the distance. The radio confirmed that there were bushfires about 250 hectares big and 25 km away from Kyneton. We decided to pack up and move into the town centre and meet up with a sustainability group hosting a BBQ for us early and get more information. The locals were very unconcerned about threat of the fire, but with us being on bikes and unable to evacuate quickly if necessary it was pretty alarming for our group. We kept an ear out for the radio and had a nice meal with the community group and performed our skit for a group of scouts. At the end of the evening, the fire was still far away from Kyneton and there was no alert for this town, but the group decided to ask to stay in the scout's hall for the night so that we would be closer to the town centre in case things changed over night. Towns south-west of us were on high alert and the winds were bringing the fire east, towards the town that we were planning to go to today.

We rotated team members over night to get up and check the radio updates every hour and had everything ready to go in case. The fire was downgraded from 'urgent' to an 'alert' in the area and it had slowed down its eastern movement, but by morning it had burned through 2200 ha and 300 firefighters were on location working through a cold morning to prevent it from moving further.

The crew had a meeting this morning and there were many mixed emotions as to the events of last night and everyone's perceived level of danger. I don't think that the crew is in any immediate danger on their ride today, but not being particularly comfortable with the team's ability to move or make decisions quickly in an emergency, I decided to head back to Melbourne today and will meet them when they arrive on Thursday.

So that is the end of my bike riding adventure around rural Victoria! It went really well and we had some really amazing experiences along the way. I'm really looking forward to starting the next leg of my Australian tour, but I'm definitely going to miss seeing the country from the seat of my bike. It's definitely the best way to travel!

Cheers,
Candice

Over 1000 kms!

Bush fire sunrise

Picnic in the park with a sustainability group in Maryborough

We're over 1000 km on our tour route and making our way back around to Melbourne. We're in the lovely town of Castlemaine at the moment and on to Bendigo tomorrow. Castlemaine is Melbourne's "weekender" town, so it is full of sidewalk cafes, kitschy shops and beautiful historic brick buildings.

Cheers,
Candice

Fire fighting in Victoria

We've been seeing this image a lot in the media in the coverage of the bushfires and I wanted to share it - the CFA in Victoria is really something spectacular. Almost all fire fighters in Victoria are volunteers. Only in big cities like Melbourne are there paid positions. All rural towns have a completely voluntary team. It's unbelievable how much they are expected to do though! They can be called at anytime and whisked away from their hometowns to help with fires anywhere in the state. Depending on their day jobs, a primary school might have a shortage of teachers because they are out fighting fires. I think that it's amazing that people are so committed to keeping their towns safe and providing members of the community to fight fires anywhere in the state. CFA is one of the world’s largest volunteer-based emergency services. There are around 58,000 volunteer members supported by over 400 career fire fighters and officers and more than 700 career support and administrative staff.

Over 900 kms so far... photo update

An update in photos from some of the tour legs. Text update below.

Me and Blue in a shovel at the gold mine in Stawell On top of the "Big Hill" overlooking Stawell

Birthday sleepies in Halls Gap! Midnight pancakes and jam (and wine)

Late night trailer practice in a parking lot

Dancing in the park in Warrnambool

Red sky at morn...

Bush fire sunrises have been painting the skies red and orange in the mornings lately. I've never seen a red sunrise and there is something really wuite eerie about a giant red fireball in the sky. "Red sky at night, cyclists' delight. Red sky at morn, cyclists be warned..." We were joking a few nights ago about how we've had these incredible vibrant sunrises - supposed to be a bad sign for sailors, does it transfer to cyclists?

It was just a saying until 6 am the other day when we were 10 km out into our ride from Ararat to Maryborough with the second crew group and we saw a truck racing towards us, slamming on the brakes as we approached. The driver yelled out to us that there "has been an accident with your group up ahead" and that she was checking to see where the ambulance was. In disbelief, we raced on ahead as the ambulance came up behind us and a couple kms ahead we learned that a crew member had come off her bike after getting the wobbles down a hill with a trailer. She hit her head and landed on her cheek, she was unconcious for a few seconds, but came to quickly. She had cut her face pretty badly and her hands and knees were scratched up. The ambulance took her back to Ararat and the woman who had stopped in her truck took two crew members back with their bikes to the hospital to wait for updates.

The rest of us were left with a pretty shaken up group, odds and ends from the other three that didn't get taken back to Ararat and had to organize a plan. We eventually decided to keep moving on to the first checkpoint on the way to Maryborough, 25 kms from Ararat, and wait for news before heading further away. We figured that it wouldn't help having 12 other people in the hospital waiting around and causing more confusion.

Getting updates from the two people at the hospital with our injured member really helped us keep moving on our ride. Even so, the 90 km ride to Maryborough was a long one. She's doing really well (and is apparently very charming on morphine), no fractures, no lasting damage, but one hell of a lack eye and a mandatory 5 to 7 days rest, which means we probably won't see her again until the tour is done and hopefully we all meet back in Melbourne. I'm really going to miss this crew member in particular - she's been someone I've felt an especial friendship with.
It's also been amazing to see the generosity of the woman who stopped in her truck when she saw the accident. She stayed with the group and hauled people back to Ararat with her. She put those two up in her house out of town that evening and drove them back to Ararat the next morning to visit the hospital. She drove another crew member all the way to Maryborough so that he could join us for the school presentation this morning and has offered to do more driving to make sure that the other crew member still in Ararat makes it back to the group after the girl in the accident heads home. She has really been incredible and we can't thank her enough.

Outside of all that, things are going really well. We've had a super busy schedule with tons of school performances and riding every other day to a new town. We've only got a handful left: from here on to Castlemaine, then Bendigo, Kyneton, Woodend and back to Melbourne. I can't believe how far we've come! We're staying in a really cute Scout's Hall in Maryborough and a couple people managed to do some "urban gleaning" and come back with boxes full of fresh fruit and veggies that were waiting on a pallet to be thrown out by a large supermarket just next door. If I'm going to take away one thing from this tour: it's shock at how much good food we throw out. We are so wasteful! Why is all of this food being put in a dumpster? We put so much of our energy and resources into growing, raising, watering, fertilizing, harvesting and processing all this food - wrapping it up in pretty packages, trucking it across countries, shelving, tagging, organizing it and then throwing it into a bin. There's got to be a better way than this.

A break for birthdays, the mid-tour mark and another heat wave

Hi all,
It's been a really busy time on the tour and I've been finding it tough to get time to update this, but we have a little downtime today between performances in the lovely town of Stawell. I had a really great birthday in Halls Gap - the crew made it really special with midnight pancakes and beverages to kick off the day and then hiking, swimming, kangaroo spotting and even a "Tim Tam" cake that a handful of people baked from scratch with no recipe. Tim Tams are these really strange biscuits covered in chocolate that you bite opposite corners off of, then suck tea through it and shove it in your face as the whole thing starts to melt and mush. It's a little intense, even for a chocolate lover such as myself. We had another birthday a couple days later, so we've been stuffing oursleves with cake for the last three days. Not sure if we're biking hard enough to quite work off those eating habits!

The Grampians (called Gariwerd by indigenous people) were beautiful and we spent a lot of time exploring, hiking up to "The Pinnacle" and enjoying a swim in the "Venus Baths" - natural rock pools that have formed from running water. A highlight of the weekend was visiting the Brambuk National Park and Cultural Centre and learning a lot about the geology of the area (amazing sandstone mountains that were originally coastal and now a high-elevation mountain island in the middle of a sea of farmland, home to over 50 endemic plant species and a handful of animals that occur nowhere else in the world!) and about the culture of various indigenous species that live in the area. We got to hear the "Dreamtime Creation Story" that different aborignal groups believe explain how the area formed and a lot of the artwork in the area is reflective of this story's themes. (If you want to read it, you can find it here: Gariwerd Creation Story). We had a few days to enjoy the park as we have hit the midpoint of the cycle tour and had planned extra time for the group to recharge and reflect on how the tour is going so far. It was a really great chance to gather up some of the energy I may have left behind on the hills we climbed rolling into the area!

On to Stawell yesterday where we are presenting our skit three times to different groups and giving workshops to a year 11 class at the secondary school. We are staying with a family in town which is so nice - again, enjoying the luxury of beds!

The crew has been safe from the bush fires that have been roaring through Victoria. Luckily, our path has been completely clear, though there are areas that have been hit that are in our future path. We're all keeping a close ear to the news and checking in with worried family members as often as we can. It's been really hard on everyone to have been out of touch from news and television for so long and to arrive and hear about so much devastation. Over 180 people have died in the fires, thousands are homeless and number of communities have been completely destroyed. A number of crew members are from small towns in Victoria and I think that it is especially hard on them to feel so connected to it, but so distanced by travelling in this community that is rather cut off from family and updates.

Hope all is well at home and keep in touch!
Candice

Photo update from Portland and Dunkeld

First koala sighting at the Thornbill Eco Education Centre! Wheeeeeeeee!

Arriving in Dunkeld - our first sight of mountains! (Mount Sturgeon and Mount Abrupt)

Joy, me and (a painting of) her father, the baker in the Dunkeld's history museum

Sunset in the arboretum in Dunkeld

On to the Grampians National Park (Gariwerd) after a 6 km hill climb in the dark (with the trailer).

An 11 km hike in the Grampians National Park - "The Pinnacle"

Warrnambool to Portland - 110 kms
It feels like months have passed since I've updated this - so much has been going on, so much riding and a lot of really interesting towns. I quickly mentioned earlier that we had completed the 100 km ride (on which I hauled a trailer for half the trip and got my first flat tyre in the first 30 km... oof, racing tyres are a little tricky to change, but with a little help, I think I've gotten the hang of it. I'm hoping to not get too may opportunities to practice, though!) The route was marked by wind farms, kangaroos and flat, fast riding. That day was super hot again and we ended up hitting the 80 km mark in the hottest part of the day and detouring to check out the permaculture farm. It was incredible to see though and we were given a whole trailer full of organic veggies and a laundry basket full of apricots, so the fight to get the fully-loaded road bike through a 5 km gravel road was worth it!

We pulled into Portland that night by 9 pm, taking a scenic ocean road from the farm to the Legacy Lodge where we stayed. It was such a treat to have individual beds! We gave our first school presentation to the "welcome back" assembly in a gym at a small college. The year 7 and 8s seemed to enjoy it for the most part and it is nice to see the crew feeling re-energized by putting on the performance and getting the sustainability message out. I spent a bit of time in the afternoon at a local bike store owned by Venessa and her dad, Peter. I was hoping to get a full tune-up done on my bike to make sure that I'm wearing it in alright... 450 kms may have been pushing it a bit as I had just started to notice my gears grinding more than normal and I needed to get my tyres pumped up to a higher pressure than I could do by hand. Peter was amazing and went over everything with me - checked out the whole bike and made a bunch of little adjustments totally free of charge. He spent twenty minutes explaining how all the cables worked with the derailleurs and what I can do to make sure the gears keep changing smoothly as I break in the bike. It was really cool to feel like I'm getting to know my bike better and I couldn't believe how much time and knowledge he was willing to share to some Canuck that just walked in the door. He did the same for two other girls and the guy in our group. Thank you Peter!

We did another presentation to a small class of year 7s that afternoon, which was much nicer than the gym assembly. We were able to interact a lot more with the kids and even the cool guy at the back making sarcastic faces managed to giggle a few times by the end. My character (Mother Earth's little sister) breaks out the fart jokes pretty early on in the skit... eep.
Portland to Hamilton - 88 kmsA much nicer ride in cool, crisp, misty morning weather as we turned back inland and headed to Hamilton. Our first check point was a small town called Heywood, about 30 kms away and the first group waited for the others to check in. While we were waiting, we were very awkwardly serenaded by a really old dude in a truck who insisted that we listen respectfully to some Scottish bagpipe music blasting out of his stereo at 7:30 am in the middle of the street! Aaaah, the excitement of small towns! On to a town called Branxholme, where we enjoyed a cappucino amidst hordes of persistent flies waiting for the next group to check in. Bush fires have been a problem in the area due to the heat wave, so it was good to get an update from the locals that they were under control where we are riding. We passed through an area that had been burnt through and a few kms of unsealed road made the going pretty slow. It was so good to finally get into Hamilton by 2:30 pm as the sun was zapping our energy. We stopped in the middle of the town on the side of the road, plopped our dirty, smelly, sweaty butts down on the sidewalk and devoured a litre of ice cream. (It's funny what now seems totally normal to us but probably looked really odd to passing cars - we got a few honks.)

In Hamilton, we stayed in the incredible Hamilton Institute of Rural Learning. A beautiful complex of buildings on 10 acres of developed land and another 200 acres of protected farmland for wildlife and native plant conservation. We slept in The Hall, which was a cathedral style room with butterfly netted ceilings to keep the place cool, hardwood floors and local art quilts on the walls. The place was a little obsessed with "bandicoots" a rodent-type thing that is being reintroduced in the area. They had a weird stuffed bandicoot display at the front and really pretty hardwood inlay of the little guys in the hall. Kinda weird...
Group life has been a little tougher this week... stress levels have been pretty high with everyone over the early mornings we've had, the long distances that we've been doing, the heat stroke incident in Warrnambool and a lot of emotional stuff has been coming out in the meetings. I've been feeling a little disconnected over the last week and a bit surprised in myself that I am not all that excited by all the feelings-sharing ("are you kidding me, they want to talk about their feelings again?"). I usually think of myself of a good listener and generally empathetic, but wow, I have hit my limit for feelings. Can't we just go for bike rides or runs or something? Maybe go for a beer? :)

Hamilton to Dunkeld - 33 kms
A short ride and a bit of extra sleep was a welcome break for this leg of the trip. I took the trailer again for this beautiful ride - undulating road with absolutely no wind and reasonable temperatures. We have arrived in the Grampians National Parks, for which Dunkeld is the gateway to the southern tip of the area. Just out of Hamilton rose the peaks of Mounts Sturgeon and Abrupt through a misty sunrise. The view reminds me of driving into the mountains in Banff a bit, when they're really far away. In this flat, flat land, a couple of peaks (around 700 m only) look deceivingly mountainous.

In Dunkeld (population 450), I met a woman, Joy Clarke, who has been a highlight of the entire trip. She had prepared afternoon tea for us and left it in the park across from her veranda at 9 am. We didn't end up arriving in the park until after 11 as we had lazily stopped at a cafe on the edge of town for a while. By the time we got to the park, people were hungry, so we grabbed some groceries and started making a salad just across from what we thought was someone else's picnic all set up. Suddenly, a quickly-moving aged person comes storming across the park waving a broom at us! She is demanding at the top of her lungs "Are you the bikers? The bike group that was supposed to arrive at 9 this morning?" We're happy and lazy and say hello and she asks what the hell we're sitting there for when she has hadteaandcoffeeandcakesandfoodalloutforussincethemorningitisprobablyallruinednowwhatarewethinking? All this time she is waving the broom like she is going to take someone out with it and all we can do is follow her over while she explains the spread and effusively try and thank her! She stormed off as quickly as she had come and left us wide-eyed in surprise and delight when we saw all of the food!

Joy gave Julia and I a tour of the local museum, which is a two-room church, converted into historical gem. It was amazing - she gave us an incredibly detailed account of how the place came to be and how all of the things in there were acquired. It was a pretty incredible story of how the town was settled, the different explorers that moved through the area and the connection to Scotland in the area (the town was originally called Mount Sturgeon but the Scots came and renamed it Dunkeld after the Scottish version). The museum itself is largely the result of efforts by women in the area (some with a passion for education and history, some widowed in the war wanting to preserve their town's history as they get older) to write their stories and recall all sorts of items from around the world that had originally been part of the town but had since been moved to other museums around the world. They're slowly bringing things home and building this little treasure in a disappearing town. Joy is the daughter of a baker (which meant her only problem was that she hadn't been born a boy) and worked her butt off to prove herself and finally be allowed to work alongside her dad in the bakery when she was 14. She joined the navy when she was 16 and spent four years with it. She travelled to England with a girl that she met just by advertising through a paper ("a minister's daughter responded, so obviously I wasn't going to go with HER, and luckily a hairdresser applied so I was able to have my hair done while we travelled"). She biked through Scotland on a rusty tandem bicycle with only one gear and broken brakes and got a taste for climbing hills, so she knows about biking! I loved the way she spoke, so abrupt, so factual - this is a force of a woman! At 76, I couldn't believe how with it and quick she was! No trite questions allowed! She loved that I had come all the way from Canada to see Dunkeld.

A bunch of people from the town came out and put on a fabulous barbecue for us with so much food and amazing desserts. A handful of the community had offered their homes for us to stay in, so I requested that I get matched up with Joy because I was enjoying her stories so much! She was giving me a hard time - I'm so young, no experience, what have I possibly had time to do with my life so far? I told her a bit about my family and what my sisters and I have gotten up to in school and she was so excited that I had done an engineering degree. I told her about the Iron Ring stuff and she thought it was a fantastic story. After that, she had me taking photos with her dog so she could send some mail back to my mom and let her know I was doing alright in Australia! (So Mom, look out - you're getting photos and recipes for homemade gingerbread and a 1800s recipe for shortbread in the mail!) She had me and another girl all tucked into a guest bedroom and was up before 4 am with us making us breakfast and sending us along our way. It was one of the nicest sleeps I have had - I felt so safe and looked after... it made Australia feel like home!

We were supposed to stay two days in Dunkeld, but we are being hit with another heat wave and bush fires are quite a danger in the area. We decided to take off early the next day for a 67 km route through the Grampians to Halls Gap. We left by 5 am and had a solid hour in pitch black as we picked our way through a parks highway. I had volunteered for the trailer again (thinking that I would have a day of rest between rides) but no such luck. Harder still, we climbed continuously for the first 6km of the ride. It was the toughest physical challenge I've had so far on the tour and I didn't think I would make it past 10 km if the whole ride would climb like that. Finally the road levelled for a moment before plunging downwards in the dark and we flew through the next 3 km in an eerie, dark, winding road, lit only by our headlamps and tail lights! Whew, that was a little stressful and one person clipped a wallabee that jumped across the rode as we descended! Finally, the dark grew into dawn and we had one of the most beautiful rides I could imagine. Mountains, winding roads, no cars at all, the bush on either side filling our noses with the scent of eucalyptus, tons of wallabees darting through the bush and ahead of us, cockatoos circling and screeching and even one kangaroo sighting (they are alarmingly enormous!). There was a beautiful, soft mist hanging over us, keeping us cool into the morning and we rode around cliffs and hills. The ride was definitely a challenge: we kept climbing and falling over the next 30 km (mostly climbing) until we reached a divide marking at at elevation of 424 m. It sounds so small to my Rocky Mountain mind, but considering we had been 3 m above sea level in Hamilton, it was a pretty good climb! From there on, we had a fast, fun downhill ride into Halls Gap where we are having the mid-tour retreat, my birthday!, and an extra day to explore, hike and enjoy this little tourist trap in the middle of the parks.
We spent the rest of the afternoon that heated up to 40 degrees again relaxing inside, eating ice cream and checking out the Venus Baths a couple km away from the town centre. They are some natural pools that have filled on a rock slab, cool and refreshing (how quickly the body forgets that it has been sweating like mad for the last few hours - that water is cold!) We have the luxury of air conditioning in the hall we're staying in and - while we wouldn't usually indulge in the extra power required - today the temperature has risen to 47 degrees and it is unbearable to step outside! Wind storms have picked up which will bring a cool change over the next couple of days before we ride on Tuesday. Bush fires have broken out in the north part of the park, so we'll be waiting to hear a bit more information before we head out on hikes and our next ride into Stawell. Looking so much forward to a day off on my birthday!

Cheers, Candice

100 km... and then some!

Hi all,
Finished the 100 km leg yesterday, though it ended up being closer to 110 as we detoured at the 80 km mark to visit a "permaculture" farm that grows its own organic food (including chickens, lamb and more than all the veggies and fruit they could eat). It was pretty incredible and we were loaded down with boxes full of fruit and veg so very generously donated. http://thornbill.com.au/
On to Hamilton tomorrow, another 89 km away and then we'll have a nice short leg and a day off in a town called Dunkeld at the foot of the Grampians National Park. Very much looking forward to the scenery!

Oh! Almost forgot... there were kangaroos bounding through fields along our ride all morning and then there were 3 koalas just hanging out in the trees on the farm. We could get within 3 feet of one that was on a tree at eye level! Crazy!
Ciao
C