Day 7 – A Lazy Day

Kristoff Alleghert is a legend in ultra-cycling. He has won some of the toughest races in the world with huge margins, and had a solid lead in IPWR 2017 when it was halted. He doesn’t write nearly as much as I do, but he does write a bit (and what he does write, he surely writes quicker), and one thing I remember reading from him is “Standing around waiting for the rain to stop is not a solution”. In my defence, I was not standing.

My alarm had gone off and I woke in a comfortable bed in a darkened room (I really love good curtains) to the sound of driving rain coming down outside. I grabbed my phone, and I opened up the tracking page. It was 6am, and it looked like Eddie and JJ were at border Village, nearly 500km behind me. I turned the alarm off, and went back to sleep.

Nearly four hours later I’d had a solid 8 hours of sleep, and the rain had stopped. Getting on my bike sounded like a much better idea! I packed up and rolled out, but didn’t get very far before stopping for breakfast. I think it was about 400m, and Mozzie’s Truckstop and Diner was calling my name. Despite my plans for a good breakfast to make up for last night’s cold microwave dinner, it ended up being pre-packed sandwiches and cakes. Not the best I’ve had but not the worst, and it got me on the road reasonably quickly with some snacks for later on.

It was a nice morning for riding with the air nice and cool and a gentle breeze, and although it quickly began to warm up it never really got too hot. What did happen was that the sandflies came out for real. This presents a problem, because the obvious response is to stop and put on fly repellent. Unfortunately, stopping is not a fun experience because you quickly get swarmed. Having learnt this on my previous crossing I was pre-armed with flyspray in a pump pack, so the obvious response was to grab the flyspray and pump it all over myself as far as possible while still riding.

I don’t know how much you’ve actually thought about fly-spray, but a lot of it isn’t great stuff. I suspect it isn’t great for people so I generally don’t use it unless the flies are really bad (or might be a hazard, like mosquitos in a malaria region, for example), but I know most of it isn’t good for plastic. If you doubt me on this, go and buy some regular fly-spray, spray a bit on your fingers, and then pick up something hard and plastic. It does actually have some good anti-theft properties though, because it will quickly engrave your fingerprints into that object, so you will forever afterwards be able to prove ownership. I’ve got a suspicion that it isn’t great for synthetic materials either, specifically all the clothes I was wearing while riding. This meant that I knew just pumping the spray over every part of myself as I rode probably wasn’t a great idea, but those sandflies hurt, so I did it anyway. Happily my knicks were high quality and they didn’t immediately fall off leaving me exposed to the elements, but what did happen was that my headphones suffered. I seldom actually listen to music while I ride but I usually carry some nice bone-conduction headphones so I can make calls or possibly even some live action videos (never got around to that, sorry) without blocking my ears as I ride. They stood up to a lot, but fly-spray turned out to be a step too far. The end of the protective coating quickly meant the end of the headphones as the rain got in and it all went bad.

It was a Friday afternoon, and I must admit that I was a bit surprised at just how quiet it was. I rode past Wirrulla and couldn’t see a soul about. Maybe it’s a town that keeps its activity down deep, but it sure looked quiet from the main road. There was nothing I needed though, so I decided to head on to Poochera.

Arriving in Poochera, I worried that I might have made a mistake. It was a little after 4pm by the time I arrived, and once again there was not a sign of life. I rolled down the street until I came to Dusty’s Art Gallery, which did announce that it was open and even suggested they might do some form of tea, so I wandered in through the open door.

After a minute or two of calling out I was about to leave when the proprietors came out. They apologised for keeping me waiting, explaining that they were just so busy with the birthday celebrations. I asked who’s birthday it was, and they explained that Poochera itself was turning 100, and that was why it was so busy at the moment. Of course. I asked if they might know somewhere I could get some food, and they looked doubtful but finally suggested that I try the pub, so that’s what I did.

To be fair, the pub actually had a good crowd, with probably 20 customers. The guy behind the bar told me it was possible the cook could be persuaded to cook something, but it wasn’t worth his life to ask, so he called her out so I could ask her myself. She was of course his wife, and she was also wonderfully helpful and quite happy to cook pretty much anything off the menu for me, so I quickly ordered up a storm. While waiting and then eating I also chatted with the other customers, and it turned out that most of them were in fact visitors who were in town for the birthday celebrations. I felt bad for any doubts that I may have had, and also pretty sure that their celebrations were going to be a lot of fun. I messaged the other riders though, to let them know every room was booked out until Tuesday!

It also turned out one of the visitors was a cyclist out of Melbourne who wanted to ask all kinds of questions about my bike, so I was able to enjoy two of my favourite activities (eating good food and talking about my bike) at once. Heaven!

Eventually it was time to leave, so I filled my boat with the extra hot chips I had ordered and rolled on down the road. I hadn’t gone very far when I got the message that my right power sensor was missing. Now for many who use a Garmin bike computer this will be a familiar message, and if they try to use it with Garmin Vector pedals (with built in power meter) it will be a VERY familiar message. It basically pops up any time the batteries are getting low, but I knew that wasn’t the problem, because putting in new batteries had been one thing I did while waiting for the rain to clear in Ceduna. It also pops up any time the power meter is in a bad mood. And with Vectors, it is often in a bad mood. And indeed, today it was clearly in a VERY bad mood, because the message started popping up continually. Annoyingly, every time it pops up, you need to say OK before you can go back to seeing the map you are trying to navigate from, even if the computer has already reconnected with the pedal. And it beeps. Annoyingly. It didn’t take very much of this until I, too, was in a VERY bad mood, and wondering if the best solution wouldn’t be to simply throw the computer under the wheels of a passing road-train. The miser in me wouldn’t accept that solution though, and turning it off and missing a turn seemed self-defeating.

There is, happily, another solution. It involves a toothpick and baby oil. I kid you not, the recommended action, direct from Garmin, is to apply baby oil, with a toothpick, to the batteries. I cannot count the number of battery powered devices I have owned in my life but it must be well over a thousand. Of all those devices, none of them, not a single one, has ever required baby oil and a toothpick to change the batteries, until now. A coin to open the battery cover, yes, and a occasionally even a screwdriver, but never baby oil and a toothpick. Anyway, at that moment, I didn’t have baby oil and a toothpick with me. What I did have was some Vaseline and a stick, so I decided that would have to do.

After a quick stop at a handy picnic table in Minnipa, I’m pleased to report that it worked. I’m thinking I will take the idea to Garmin, and see if I can sell it to them for $50,000. It greatly increases the workability of their system!

There wasn’t a great deal going on further on down the road, so I wasn’t stopping very often. To quote my favourite German, it is the type of area “wo sich der Fuchs und der Hase ‘gute Nacht’ sagen”, just in case you thought that it was only English that had obscure sayings!

The roads were still pretty flat and I was basically just rolling along at a steady low power, and at around 10pm it suddenly occurred to me that with a bit of drizzle falling occasionally I was getting chilly. I had two immediately obvious options – I could pedal harder to generate a bit more heat, or I could put on some arm-warmers.

While I was stopped to get the arm-warmers out of my pack I also checked the forecast and realised that not only was it going to keep raining on and off through the night, but it was also going to get noticeably colder. It was one of those moments when my drive to push on had just evaporated, leaving me cruising along. My biggest motivation at that moment was knowing that it was a good friend’s birthday the following day, and wanting to have an appropriate photo to send him as a birthday greeting in the morning.

As I had headed off to the airport to start this particular adventure a week or so earlier my wonderful mother had pressed a wad of cash into my hand, explaining that what she wanted to do was get me a hotel for the time when I really needed it but would be too stubborn to get one. The difficulty, of course, was that I would have to make that decision myself, but when I did, this was the money to do it with. Somehow at that moment I was feeling very much in need of a hotel, and I knew there was really no good reason to get one. Had it not been for that money in my wallet I would have just ridden on, but as it was I grabbed out my phone as I stood beside the road, and spent a few minutes booking a room in Kimba.

Kimba was actually only about 68km on down the road, but it took me the best part of three hours to get there. Through that time the drizzle kept up and the temperature kept dropping. By the time I got to my hotel it was freezing cold and the air was thick with fog. I was very glad to have a hotel.

It had been a strange sort of a day. After a slow start in the morning I had felt myself in the evening losing all my drive and just rolling along. This feeling was very much backed up when I looked at my bike computer at the end of the ride – I’d covered over 300km, a decent distance even if there was only around a thousand meters of climbing involved, but it had been done at such a low level of effort that my computer concluded it had been a recovery day.

On the up side, a day of recovery suggested I should be in fine form for the morning, so for now, I went to sleep!