26/01/2002

Very Long Trip - Tamworth/Cairns

I rode to Tamworth to attend the usual festival and figured while I was this far North I might as well keep going.

It took me a day to get to Tamworth a day to get to Rockhampton and a day to get to Cairns. The trip home was slower with day stops at Rockhampton, Palm Beach, Gosford and Jindabyne. Because of the short range I was very careful about filling up when I could. My strategy was to leave early, 5.00 am and then ride as far as I could before the petrol stations shut down for the night.

I went berry picking while I was at Tamworth and bought about 10 trays of berries. The farm provided a cardboard box designed to hold the containers. I strapped the box to the top of the DriRider bag and set off for the trip back to Tamworth, a distance of about 70 kilometres. I checked the box half way back, no problems. However when I arrived back at the Motel No Berries! They'd fallen off somewhere. I really wasn't impressed but I could see the funny side of the situation.

The bike didn't let me down once. I had the bike serviced at Cairns and a chain clip replaced, somehow it fell off after Rockhampton. I'm glad the chain didn't fall off.

The police pulled me over in Cairns soon after I arrived because I was riding too carefully and may have been drunk.

I'm glad the weather was unseasonable as I only suffered one day of rain and that was on the Palm Beach - Gosford leg. Quite a bit of fog from Jindabyne to past Thredbo and then again going over Mount Hotham to Omeo.

Learnt more about my DriRider jacket - every pocket external and internal leaks! Is it just me or should there be at least one pocket that doesn't leak?

The Echo F7 bike computer can't handle calculating the average speed after you have accumulated more than 999.99 km. It just displays "E." The trip display keeps going, it just doesn't display the first digit. I had to repair the sender cable for the computer at Tamworth as I cut the wire with the steering limit mechanism. I now run the wire the long way around, that should cure that problem.

The best thing I did in my preparation for the trip was to buy a throttle cruise control which I bought at one of those motorcycle shops in Elizabeth Street Melbourne. What a difference that little piece of plastic makes in reducing the tension in your shoulders, arms, wrist and fingers. I was really disappointed when I went to remove it at Palm Beach and it broke in two. A bit of Gaffer tape saw me through the rest of the trip. I wonder if there's an Aluminium version of it somewhere?

The second best thing I did was buy a Draggin Jeans Denim Jacket which was very practical in the hot weather. Not only did it keep the sun off me but it kept me cool. The DriRider came in handy for the wet days :)

An odd thing that I noticed at a couple of petrol stations was that the pumps reset themselves. This can be a good or a bad thing, just depends. Let me explain, lets say I fill up with petrol hang up the nozzle and walk in to pay the cashier. If another person arrives and uses the same nozzle, then my transaction is lost and only the second persons transaction exist. The cashier has to believe what the first person says they filled up with. I think I saved about 50 cents when this happened to me, as I remember the dollar value but not the cents. The next time I saw it, it happened to someone else - no idea how much money they saved.