Summer Journeys - Adelaide to Albury (last leg)

The final leg was by the most mentally challenging. I was excited about following the Murray River from Adelaide back home, but I think Michelle found the landscape too bare and dry (in other words too Australian).

One bike, one river

From Adelaide we rode through a hailstorm of locusts to Murray Bridge (that is the name of the town) and then wound our way north through tiny villages such as Blanchetown and Swan's Reach heading towards the Sturt Highway.

Yeah, Blanchetown was weird

We had lunch at in a quaint little town that had general store. It was for sale and the owner's did not seem happy about owning it.

Water skiing in Renmark

We passed a place called Kingston (the 2nd one in SA) OM, where OM stands for On Murray. We stopped in Renmark for a rest and a cool down and so I could steel myself for the 130km straight that separates Yamba from Mildura.

Cool fountains: Renmark

The only highlight from this one and a bit hour journey was crossing the SA border (I like taking photos of border signs).

These photos make me think I've achieved something

We picked up eating supplies in Mildura and searched for a suitable camping place on the Murray. We found one about 30 mins after nightfall and proceeded to share our 'tent' space with approximately one million mosquitoes. I clocked up about 1 hours sleep.

Michelle with breakfast the next day. She was not pleased as heaps of mossies flew out of bag as soon as I opened it.

The next day we broke records for how quickly we could pack up camp in order get away from the mossies. I was super tired, but I loved the scenary on the drive home, sticking to the Murray Valley Highway and stopping every time I thought I might fall asleep whilst driving. We crisscrossed the NSW/Vic border multiple times before reaching Mulwala where we stopped to check out the old war machines.

Using my matrix-like abilities in Mulwala

Finally we shot through Corowa and Howlong on the way back home where was a warm bed and substantially less mossies.

Howlong is a special place with a special sign

The next day we borrowed Mum and Dad's car for the drive back to Canberra. I feel the need to point out that while the were less mossies in Albury than on our night out camping, there were still some in our bedroom.

The Murray being dammed in Albury

You see, many a mosquito hitched a ride with us inside my bike bags. Those sneaky bastards than terrorised us the following night.

The Dangers of Rogaining

A warning sign just outside of the West Australian State champs rogaining area.

Whoa! What just happened?

In a crazy turn of events I had a strange night out on Thursday evening. It began with a quiet couple of drinks with some ground floor ressies, and ended like this...

Five of the coolest cats in town - for reference Mira is the one in the middle.

Michael was playing his violin with a DJ and a keyboardist at the local venue the Clubhouse, so he decided to get himself painted for the gig. Mira, a face paint artist, attacked him with gusto, (and blue paint) for the following effect.

A blue Liu

Many of the lively party goers in his room also opted to become human canvases before venturing out on the town.

Myself, Michale and Stuart - Sturat did his own painting.

The paint was such a hit that I was constantly questioned by others at the Clubhouse - all of them wanted to know where they could get their faces painted. I soon found poor Mira with her kit out painting total randoms in the stairwell! I will admit I was a bit peeved that we went from being the unusual kids in the crowd to just being the norm.

Michael tears it up on stage

Oh, an Michael sounded awesome - it was even cooler that his electric violin had some type of wireless attachment so he could play whilst stalking through the crowd.

Playin' the crowd, I got refelcted glory by hanging around him when this happened

Breaking to Daily Grind

Cracked is a comedy website I visit - here are two links to some photoshopped image competitions that they have. Both are stupendously funny.

The first one is based on combining multiple movies to make a super movie - named
Insane Movie Ideas Built out of Existing Movies

This one is Unseen Drawbacks to Living in a an Action Movie

Enjoy!

Australian University Rogaining Championship

On Thursday last week Sarah and I flew to Perth in an endeavour to bring the Nigel Aylott Trophy back to the ANU. After our cleanup at the ACT champs the ACT rogaining association had high hopes for us. This year the National university champs were held in conjunction with the West Australian State Championship, and by golly do those WA peeps love their rogaines. Over 130 teams turned up for the event.

Swan River - the camera is a but blurry due to some lens smudges (it gets worse)

We stayed the night in Fremantle and enjoyed a day relaxing before the big event by visiting a local bakery called Abhi's and swimming at Cottesloe Beach. Late in the afternoon a mini bus picked up all the student rogainers an drove us to the Hash House (ie starting/finishing point and camp area). We got a brief tour of Perth on the way.

Abhi's Bakery - highly recommended

We got to meet the student teams from Qld, Tassie, and South Australia and out first view of the coveted prize was at the airport with the Tasmanians proudly displaying the trophy they had won in the previous year. Sarah and I vowed then and there to take from them.

Keep your eye on the prize

We camped at the Hash House that night, ready for our early start as the maps of the course were to be given out at 8am - four hours before the start of the event. With four hours to prepare Sarah and I plopped down next the our arch enemies from Tasmania (Andy, Ed and Cam or as we dubbed them 'Black Ninjas and the Rainbow Warrior') to plot out a course that would bring us home the silverware.

The uni teams - the black ninjas are back row far left and front row centre. The Rainbow Warrior is back row third from the right (in the puffy vest)

We had decided early on that our main rivals were going to be the team from Tassie and after we had both finished prepping our maps we compared routes choices. They were fairly similar but we deigned to cover about 15kms more to pick up a few extra checkpoints. Time would tell if we could keep to our ambitions plan.

A tent on the course all by its lonesome

At 12 noon the starters horn blared and Sarah and took off running, much to the surprise of the other teams. The event course was quite a bit different to ACT. WA is very flat so Sarah found most of the technical controls while I picked up some new skills and knowledge while tagging along. By the time night fell I had a fair understanding of how to recognise the main features, but at night its a whole new story. In the dark we had to rely heavily on accurately following compass bearings and counting our paces.

Something to warm the night up and make the pain go away.

With night came the rain, and it quickly got cold and wet as well as limiting visibility even further. At about 11pm we ran into the Tassie team, which was pretty exciting. By this stage we knew we had ore points then them (we had traveled further and picked up more points), but we had to stay on our A game if were to win. The rest of the night went really well, we stopped by a water stop at midnight and found a bottle of port so we indulged. Sleep deprivation kicked in at about 4am and Sarah and I really struggled for the next four or five hours (until about 9am). At one point we were separated for about 15 mins in dense bush - it was very hard to find each other again. We finished strongly though, with me taking over the rains for a couple of controls (I can find the simple ones). We ended back at the Hash House at 12:52 - 8 minutes before the event finished.

A dog joined us for breakfast on Friday morning in Fremantle

Upon returning we were greeted by the news the the Rainbow Warrior (our nickname for Cam due to his rainbow coloured thermal top) had struggled in the wee hours of the morning and the team had to call it quits before sun up. This was both exciting and a little sad. The Tassie team were the only team that we believed could have challenged us and it was disappointing for them not to have done as well as expected. On the other hand we also meant we had probably won out category - and win we did. In the end we were 800 pts clear of the second placed team (UTS) with the Tassies coming third.

Celebrating the last control before home and nap time - 23 hours and 3o mins in the race

However, just like in the ACT champs the accolades weren't over yet. We also managed to be the first placed mixed team and we finished 5th overall, which isn't a shabby effort for what we though was a bungled run!

This brings our total haul for 2011 Australian university champions, ACT champions, and West Australian Mixed champions. Not too bad for my third ever rogaine (although Sarah does 98% of the navigation - I just supply the witty banter).

Sarah and I with our many WA trophies.
The smart people would have recognised that the photo of the trophy was taken in my room, thus ruining the suspense

Summer Journeys - Adelaide

Adelaide was an absolute blast. Michelle's cousin was (and presumably still is) hilarious and he has an accent that was mutated into some weird Irish twang (I assume due to his exposure to South Australians).

Michelle and Geoff

We spent most of our time finding new places to drink beer. We drank beer in the city, we drank beer at home and we drank beer at the beach. It was a really good couple of days rest and I would have loved to have stayed for another day but I had to be back in Canberra for work.

My beer and I

I also distinctly remember searching the city for a 'Noodle Box' on a Sunday (any place that resembles Noodle Choice in Dickson). Finally we had to settle for Wok in a Box, which is a terrible, terrible subsitute. We ate it overlooking the Torrens River and Adelaide Oval behind the Conference Centre - the vista nearly made up for the food.

More beer plus a purse, which is used to hold items that can be exchanged for beer

We visited Glenelg the next day because it had been over 24hours since seeing the ocean. Geoff joined us and we listened to some live music played by a bloke who looked suspiciously like Ash (I also made phallic symbols).

For those of you who do not know Ash he looks like this. He also can play the guitar.

Summer Journeys - Road to Adelaide

This leg of the trip was filled with highs and lows. Examples of a high is stopping in Mt Gambier an experiencing extreme blueness or visiting Kingston SE. An example of a low is the 145km of nothingness between Kingston and Meningie.

I get a little excited about state borders

We left Nelson fairly early on New Years Day. Michelle, ever the geologist, was very excited about witnessing the crater and blue lake. I will not lie, it actually was quite amazing and very, very blue.

Following some advice from a local Michelle and I stopped by the local motorbike races. We watched a couple of laps and left a little disappointed.
We continued up the Princes Highway stopping in Robe and Kingston SE (I think the SE stands for South East - if anyone knows please leave a comment). Robe has both an interesting name and an entry in Lonely Planet - but it seemed like a fairly boring place. We had lunch there - I think it was an amazing pizza.

Michelle locates us on the local map at Kingston SE

Kingston, on the other hand, was great. There was a stone menagerie, a giant lobster, random tiles, weather predicting rocks, and even a sun dial!After Kingston was a crapload of nothing. The road was straight and empty; we couldn't see the beach. Every now and then we would pull over to look at rock stacks (as directed by little roadsigns with cameras).

Only some people will get this joke (also in Kingston)

Suprisingly these were often better than the ones on the Great Ocean Road (ie the twelve apostles), just without the marketing of Victoria.

There was a little bit of excitement when we came across humourously named places such as Chinamen's Wells and Policemans Point (there were neither chinamen or policemen), but two chuckles didn't really liven up the hour and a half on the road.

The Kingston sundial

By the time we got to Meningie it was getting late in the evening, but Michelle and stopped to stretch our legs and do a bit of exercise at the local playground. Then we pushed on to the Mighty Murray.

The Murray, which will be a feature of a future blog post, had me ecstatically excited.

This was our first sighting - there will be many, many more

We stopped off in Tailem Bend, named after the sharp bend in the Murray. It has some history with trains I think, as there was a locomotive near the entrance to the town.After a brief rest we completed the final 100kms to Michelle's cousins house (Geoff - more on him later), where we ate a pasta feast, drank home brew and slept.

For those of you who ride motorbikes observe the angle of the 'bag rack' in the shadow.
I kept an eye on it all the way from Torquay and I am 110% surprised it didn't snap off.

Night of the pie

There's is something about Georgia's outrageousness that is somewhat contagious, and so if you you knew her you would clearly understand how the following scenario panned out. Whilst we were enjoying an episode of masterchef (I think as a guy I'm not supposed to admit to liking this particular program, but its awesomeness knows no bounds) we started discussing pie.
The conversation quickly degenerated into a yelling match over which pie was best with the end result being a night of pie. That is three courses; all pie.

Three courses of pie all in an oven

Knowing our culinary skills were not complete without ElleBro we coerced her to join the pie team by explaining the benefits of the idea (you get to eat pie all night).

Entrée and main cooking side by side

Then we set out to construct our dream meal.

The beer bottles were an intricate part of our preparation - they were used to roll the pastry. They were also empty before we started.

The entrée was a sage, leek, and goat's cheese tart - an idea stolen from the Masterchef website. It was not only delicious but allowed me to feel cultured and aloof from the everyday riffraff (because I was eating goat's cheese).

I'm not sure what looks better, the tarts or Georgia photography

The main was difficult to decide - meat pie is tasty because it provides a great excuse to eat equal amounts of tomato sauce as dinner without insulting the chef. Chicken pie is tasty because it has chicken. However, the final decision was to make a beef and guiness stew, and then throw it into a pie. This resulted in some of the best cooked potato and beef I've ever had. It also tasted like Guinness. The best part about this dish was that to eat it all we pretty much needed spoons to finish up the stew sauce.

I was a little bit excited about this experiment.

Dessert was apple pie. Hilarious because something went wrong with actually making the pie dough, so we turned it into biscuit towers (everything tastes better if it's in tower form). The best part of this dish wasn't that I got to eat the remaining stewed apples, but that my room has smelt of apples and cinnamon ever since!

Apple Biscuit Towers

The evening was finished off by drinking truly terrible wine, eating a citrus salad (that's a masterchef joke - if you were cool you would understand) and watching Black Books.

Elle and Georgia ready for dinner.