Friday 23 January 2009 - Hunters Hill

A ride that turned out to be just a little bit ugly...

Donal, Sue and Stephe figured they'd do a quick blast in the morning (Middle Cove to Hunters Hill and back in a big loop through the bush), and then catch up with their other obligations once back at the ranch fully invigorated, happy and excited.

Unfortunately, Donal's maintenance schedule continues to be a little less than robust, so we didn't actually get going until around 11am, once he had finally mounted a new tyre... Then, the starting urban section through Chatswood was probably a taste of things to come, as various cars tried to kill us, and the temperature soared up into the 40s. Once we'd dropped down to the river and made it on to trail (carefully avoiding anything that NPWS didn't want us to ride on!), we started having a bit more fun, with Sue demonstrating that fitness is a much better aid to mountain bike riding than stupidity (pretty well making each of the step ups and downs that we encountered along the way - despite a minimum of experience on the bike).

The heat was still getting to us, and after a few more hike a bike sections, we arrived at Hunters Hill with Donal out of water and Stephe in his usual "luvin' hills" state, but with the added complication of having torn out the derailleur cable and so stuck in 1st gear...

We did another urban section, and when faced with the choice of dropping back down into Blackman Park for the second half of the ride, or bailing via the roads - we did the sad thing and scummed it home...

Google Earth snapshot of the track below, with the original .gpx here:



Ah well, at least we got out (and were able to fall into a pool on our return home!).