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 November-December issue of 2003. Length: 1500 words |
One More for the Road Boy, if the rest of this country is anything like South Australia, we’ll never finish this trip. See, as we were crossing the Nullarbor we’d occasionally chit-chat about the state to come (that is, when we weren’t thinking about food), and what we hoped to get out of it. The answer: Nothing. We didn’t know anyone in South Australia, we didn’t have any places to stay lined up, and we hadn’t really even heard of much in the way of photo opportunities. In fact, even when we asked some of the locals about what to see and where to stay, there was always a long pause before they replied. On average, the best answer they could come up with was, “Well, Glenelg is nice,” but no definite answer as to why. One bloke, Gary, an Adelaide native and unofficial fan club president of Cooper’s Pale Ale, seemed to think Glenelg was a worthwhile visit based solely on the fact that it was a palindrome. So we figured, three weeks. Four at the outside. Then we’d be back into Victoria! Hooray! Our speedometer clock would finally be correct again. But, rearing its many unpredictable heads, as the Hydra of Fate occasionally tends to do, nine weeks later we crossed the Victorian border. I can tell because the pubs are advertising VB again instead of West End. And it’s freezing. But at least… our speedometer clock is finally correct again! Hooray! Six weeks overdue! Why the delay? I mean, the entire state of South Australia, Nullarbor Roadhouse to Naracoorte, isn’t any more than 2000km, even including the side trip down the Eyre Peninsula. So where did our time go? It wasn’t that the terrain was particularly difficult, or the traffic was too intense, the winds too strong, or even that we suffered a plethora of breakdowns and punctures. Sure, those sorts of things slow a guy down – 10 minutes here, 10 kilometres there – but even the sum of all of those things a dozen times over couldn’t account for a month and a half of lost time. Though the story would be much more exciting if I could say we were held prisoner by the infamous Murray Bridge Bunyip, it sadly wouldn’t be true. In reality, our time was sucked away by the hungriest, most unforgiving, voracious monster of all: Hospitality. One more drink. One more dinner. One more night’s sleep under a down doona. But tomorrow, we’ve really got to get going. Unless it’s raining, of course. Or windy. If it is, then just one more one more one more… And rightly so, I say. After all the work we did going over the top end, I’d say we deserved a bit of a break, don’t you? That break was supposed to occur when we got to Horsham, our old stomping grounds in Victoria, but it’s just as well with us if we get to take a few extra days off in Port Lincoln. And Tumby Bay. And Port Neill, Port Augusta, Clare, Mintaro, Adelaide, Saunders Gorge, Murray Bridge… By the way, if you’re the type of cyclist who is thinking about doing a Perth-Adelaide or Perth-Sydney ride, we highly recommend popping down to Port Lincoln. It may add an extra 400km onto your trip, but it’s a very pretty extra 400km. If you hate roadhouses as much as we do, we’ve heard taking the Ceduna-Port Augusta “shortcut” actually just lengthens the Nullarbor to 1600km long, instead of 1200km. By riding down to Port Lincoln and back up the other side, you effectively end the chain of roadhouses and begin a new chain of quaint fishing villages. If you’re not in a hurry (as we obviously aren’t), it’s a sensible trade-off, to say the least. Aimee and I arrived in Port Lincoln at exactly the right time. It was 10:30am on a Sunday, and the Peninsula Pedallers were two blocks away from finishing their morning ride. They were on their way to a café on the foreshore and invited us to come along, presumably because we looked ragged, overburdened, undernourished, and we were steering a four-meter-long, half-tonne juggernaut through town. Just the sort of people who probably had a story or two to tell. (On a side note: Why, at a roadhouse, do we scoff if the price of Coke is more than a dollar a can, but once we get into a town, we don’t even blink at paying $2.50 for a flat white? But I digress.) We did tell a story or two. Then we told a few more. In fact, we told enough stories that we were invited home to Raelene & Kingsley’s place that evening, for a drink, a barbeque, and even more stories. That night, we slept in a warm bed. It was so nice, we slept in that same bed for three more nights after that. On Thursday morning, we tore ourselves away from the clubhouse and waved a tearful goodbye. But don’t worry; South Australia’s friendliness didn’t end when we left Port Lincoln… Kingsley was good friends with the caravan park owners in Tumby Bay, 40km away, and he could hook us up with a bed there. Then, Martin, another Peninsula Pedaller, gave us the key to his uncle’s summer shack in Port Neill. Not only that, another of the Pedallers had some friends up in Port Augusta, Bernie and Ben, that we could stay with. Sweet! We were set! Raelene did the first 10km out of Port Lincoln on the Penninger, taking Aimee’s place in the front seat while Aimee rode Raelene’s two-wheeler. I think Raelene may have said she was having a good time, but I couldn’t really hear her, what with the gale-force headwind we were fighting. She was probably able to pedal back home within five minutes of saying goodbye. Meanwhile, Aimee and I didn’t even make it to Tumby Bay. By the end of the day, we’d done 30.3km, and the wind wasn’t going to let us do any more. We asked a farmer if he’d let us set up camp in his tractor shed to get out of the wind. That sounded good to him, but his wife would have none of it. She made us sleep inside. The next day, the wind had abated and we made it to the Tumby Bay Caravan Park to accept the hospitality of John and Diana. Martin’s shack in Port Neill was a welcome break from some of the worst weather we’d experienced on the trip so far. We liked it so much, we stayed a week! Whyalla had its own unique blend of helpfulness and hospitality. The night before, a part snapped on Aimee’s trike. Nothing major, just a seat support, and to its credit, the only structural damage the Penninger had sustained in 12,000km of riding. We fixed it with duct tape. At the Whyalla shopping centre, we started chatting to a bloke with a unique bike of his own: a restored chrome Vintage, one of only seven in Australia. We mentioned to him that we needed a welder to fix our trikes. Well, Rob called Reg, who was not only a welder but was also his dad. Reg had the wrong kind of torch to fix it, but he called Paul, who had the right one. 15 minutes later, the seat was shaved, sparked, soldered and sprayed back to its lustrous black. Problem solved! We arrived in Port Augusta the next day and called Bernie and Ben, who were on school holidays down in Adelaide. But, not to worry… they told us where they’d hidden a key for us, and we could go in and make ourselves at home! We’d never even met them! There was the Hill family in the historic town of Mintaro, who invited us home for dinner and a night’s sleep. There was Syd, a fellow touring cyclist who’d been following our website since our first article in Australian Cyclist, who presented us with his lounge room floor for a week. Nadene and Brenton from the Saunders Gorge Sanctuary, a wonderful hideaway near Mt. Pleasant, had been following our trip since Day 1 and offered us several nights of luxury accommodation, excellent food and entertaining conversation. Finally, we spend two nights in Murray Bridge at the Balcony B&B with Pat and Brian, before moving on to the state border. Sigh. That, my friends, was how three weeks became nine. One more drink, one more dinner, one more night. They add up. But I know I’d rather add up the number of days we were invited back to a nice warm fire and a glass of port than the number of tires we had to change. As the saying goes: ‘Tis better to be slowed by hospitality than by fatality. Are you hearing this, Victoria? South Australia has set the benchmark, and you’ve got a tough act to follow. We’ll be knocking on your door soon enough. |
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