As luck would have it, all of the KJRA consultants who actually live in Canberra own, and ride cruiser style motorcycles! Michael rides a Suziki Boulevard, Neil rides a vintage Yamaha Virago and I ride a Harley Fatboy which as Johnny and Behzad said 'sounds evil'. So in the spirit of team building and hitting the open road those of us (Michael & I) who were on leave headed out for a day's ride.
The rendezvous point was Bungendore which is about 30 mins drive from Canberra on the way to the coast. We had previously decided that rather than battle with the hoards of Canberrians heading to the coast for New Years that we'd head in land and so Tarago was the next stop. The ride is along well sealed roads country roads and accordingly there is minimal traffic. We pasted the newest (and largest) of the districts wind farms and it is just amazing the size of the turbines they are huge. I counted 15 towers, but apparently there is actually 25 in total. Once we reached Tarago 'The Loaded Dog Hotel' was our pub of choice, its steeped in history having opened in 1848 and really there is not much else in Tarago! We had a yarn with the publican, who was most interested in the 'hoops' one had to go through to get a bike license these days. There was a couple of friendly locals and a hand full of other bikers, but the road was calling!
From Tarago we headed for Goulburn and then on to Crookwell, passing by another wind farm which was much smaller than the one we passed earlier. Crookwell was the designated fuel stop for both man and machine, and I thought getting a Pie n sauce might have been an easy option for lunch. However it seems it would have been far easier to go for a pub lunch. The first bakery we stopped at looked open but was not, and then the second bakery we found was open but didn't sell pies or sausage rolls - which was most curious. To my way of thinking this makes it more of a cafe than a bakery. The lady in the no pies bakery said if its pies your after then try 'Barkers Bakery' down the street and so with this vital piece of local knowledge we pushed on in the quest for the great Aussie lunch. Finally we arrived at Barkers and surveyed the offerings of pies on the menu boards, and I asked for a steak and mushroom pie only to be disappointed once again. Since it was getting close to 1:30pm the pie stocks had dwindled and alas no Steak and mushroom pies were left - Doh! So Michael and I changed tack, and asked "well what do you have?" luckily there was two pepper steak pies left so Michael and I didn't have to go toe to toe over who ate and who didn't.
Now that the men were full, it was time to feed the machines and head for home. The road between Crookwell and Gunning is fabulous those of us that enjoy two wheels and loads of twist and turns, with some gentle rises and downhill runs for some great riding. As seemed to be the pattern thus far we passed yet another wind farm and we quite rightly questioned if we'd joined the southern NSW wind farm tour! At the end of this short run is Gunning where three more bikes just out for a run tagged along as we headed too Gundaroo, our final stop. To keep our stops consistent, we pulled into 'Matt's Wine Bar' for a quite ale.
My final comments relate to bugs (well we are a testing company!). Along the some of the 250 odd kilometers we covered we discovered more than a few bugs! There was the bugs that went SPLAT as they hit my sunnies, the ones that went THUD as the collided with my helmet and the rather interesting ones that caused me to go OH Sh!t that hurt as they smacked me in the cheek. Though none of these compared to the legend of the Christmas Beetle that the publican at the Loaded Dog spoke about. He said he'd seen results of an encounter with one of hovering bricks that had crunched into a fellow open face helmet, Harley riding compardray and it wasn't a pretty site! A welt as big as your elbow, squarely in the middle of his head. And he said if you looked close enough you could see the outline of the jolly fatmans' face in the mooshing of blood and skin were skull met beetle! I'll just have to trust him on that one, but needless to say I was on high alert watching for the hovering beasties and even ducked under a couple to avoid a collision. We were within 50kms of home and blasting down the Gundaroo Rd when out of no where BANG! a bug of some sort smashed into the lower rim of my sunnies, and as if that wasn't scary enough then I felt the wriggling and squirming of the bug behind my glasses on my eye lid - seems this bug was not done yet! It would have been so much simple had he just sucked it up and died when he got split in two by my glasses, but no he wanted to fight some more. Luckily for me he was under the right hand side of my glasses and easily squished with my left hand (the now on the accelerator!).
All in all it was a great day for bike riding and a fitting start to a new KJRA Canberra tradition of two wheeled team building. Until new time stay rubber side down and shinny side up!
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