It all starts here...

Tuesday November 30th 2011

Hi and thank you for looking! I'm about to set off on a long bike ride, and maybe even a series of rides, and intend to record them all in this new blog. Previous blogs covered my long distance rides from Sydney to Brisbane and Melbourne to Sydney, and a shorter ride around NSW that was meant to be longer but got curtailed due to lack of time, and bad weather.

All these previous rides were following routes from the Lonely Planet Guide to Cycling Australia, which details 32 rides taking a total of 138 days cycling. Now that I have plenty of time to spare I’m intending to do more of these rides and will write about them all in this new blog.

There will be gaps in between rides when I probably won’t post anything, though there might be the occasional post about skating if I swap 2 wheels for 8. If you subscribe to the blog you will get an email notification every time there is a new post (at least I think this is the case)

Well here we go then - the first ride is a 3 day loop through the Avon Valley in Western Australia, starting and ending in Perth.

Since arriving in Australia I’ve been staying with friends in Sydney, and it rained almost continuously for the first week I was there. I’d been planning to take my bike on the bus to Melbourne and ride up to Adelaide via the coast, but on checking the long-range weather forecast it looked like the bad weather in NSW was heading down to Victoria. So instead I booked a flight over to Perth where I knew it would be sunny and warm, it always is in Western Australia.

Getting to the start

I rode down to Sydney airport on the afternoon of Tuesday 29th November. Crossing the Harbour Bridge is always an excellent start to any ride:

It was good safe riding along the new cycleway along Kent St towards the city centre:

…and heading out towards the airport there is another good cycleway along Bourke St which means you can reach the airport almost entirely segregated from the rest of the traffic.

I arrived in good time as I knew that the bike would need to be boxed up for the flight. This took a lot less time than I’d anticipated.

The flight to Perth takes 4hrs 30 mins and this one departed an hour late. So I didn’t get to Perth until about 11pm local time. After reassembling the bike and riding to the motel I’d booked nearby, in Midland, a suburb about 3 kms from the airport, it was well after midnight.

Distance covered today was 26kms.