Day 523 | Dropping down to Adelaide: way down there
60 km | zzOz total: 16,982 km
As you approach civilisation of the suburban kind these dirt roads become more manicured, smooth white clay, limestone even, with the minimum sprinkling of fine white gravel, they’d play on this surface at Roland Garros.
The names have started to change from those like Black Snake Road, Running Postman Road, Stone Hut Road to the more sedate Maidment, Croft or Neudorf Roads.
You run along the ridges in the Adelaide Hills which means plenty of up and down. Strangely the sum of the up component always seems to far exceed any downs, is that Mt Torrens just there, in a similar manner it always being a headwind on a bike, at least when you travel south on the Australian continent.
It’s Sunday morning and I’m at the top of one of the favourite mountain bike haunts, soft tailed species, around Adelaide, Cudlee Creek and I’m passed by plenty of Subarus with fully loaded bike racks on the back. They stare at my fully loaded caravan as I granny cog my caravan up the hill, sitting in their motorised transportation, I’ve always felt it’s cheating to use a chair lift in snow, but close attention is something I need to become accustomed to this beautiful autumn day.
I careen off down the Trail causing a minor traffic jam for a minute before the daredevil crew plunge off the edge of the track on one of the advanced rated drops, can’t remember the exact name but they are called things like Dynamic Tension, 10 Saws, The Guts, Immaculate Compaction or Human Projectile. Quickly I’m back on my own and negotiating all those lost downhills, all in one rush, except it’s not quite the speed you might imagine with my caravan, the view a V slice of Adelaide down The Gorge and across to the blue of the Spencer Gulf, closer now, dropping in a hurry from almost 650 m.
Down at the bottom, after The Gorge I connect with the Torrens River bike trail, at times obscurely marked, as the odd staring city eyes bike sedately past. At one point I’m stationery and a couple engage with my story, we chat for half an hour and they hand over their collected set of bike path maps for Adelaide to help me orientate myself. They know the paths and they are off to a bike shop anyway, they’ll pick up replacements there.
As I look on the map for a route to the centre of this large city I just hope Mary has replied to my email asking for her address again that she had written in my old notebook still up in a box in Speewah, just out of Cairns.