Journal

Simon is an engineer and good bloke who makes me and my friend Peter laugh - a lot. He also has a new BMW R1250RS that he bought in late 2019 but fires and floods that followed Simon's purchase meant the new BMW had few kilometres on the clock (if that's what you can call a TFT display). Naturally Simon was itching for a multi-day ride, so he organised one.

Simon might find uploading photos to DropBox a challenge but he's a legend when it comes to planning rides. While the trips I run are organised a few days before departure Simon had booked accommodation; organised telescope tours and planned hikes in the Warrumbungle National Park a month before our departure date of March 12, 2020.

The shortest route is not always the smartest route

Our meeting place was McDonald's Mt Colah because it is convenient; has parking; coffee and toilets. A reasonable meeting time of 9:30am should avoid peak-hour traffic and not require a pre-dawn rise. I was right about not having to get up early and wrong about missing the traffic. The take-away lessons from my hour long, 20Km trip from Elanora to Mt Colah are: 1. school drop-off traffic brings chaos to our roads and 2. ignore your GPS if the shortest route it plans takes you past a primary school drop-off zone at 9:15am. As someone who has worked in schools for a long time, you'd think I'd know that.

Motorcycles invariably cause trucks to materialize on any winding road

One of the fundamental physical laws of the universe must be something like: if a road is windy and fun on a bike then a truck will always attempt to occupy the road at the same time as you. This law was at work as we rode through the hairpins of Galston Gorge. When the consequences of this law is encountered at the beginning of a trip one can be philosophical about it and enjoy being on your bike - so its only affect for us was to delay by a few minutes our arrival at the Stonehouse Cafe on Wiseman's ferry Rd Maroota for the first of many coffee stops.

Coffee stops have 3 functions on a ride such as this - to defuel and refuel (the riders, not the bikes) and to allow conversations that have rattled around inside your head an opportunity to be expressed aloud. While I understand the attraction of 2-way communication devices their downside must be that they result in a dearth of topics to be discussed over coffee - surely suitable topics would have already dribbled out via Bluetooth?

One of the 2019 bush fires close to Sydney was called the Gosper's Mountain fire. I hadn't heard of Gosper's Mountain before the fire that started there consumed Wollemi National Park and in the process closed the Putty Road for weeks. The Grey Gum Cafe, about half way between Windsor and Singleton on the Putty Rd, may have escaped the fires thanks to the great work of the RFS, but it couldn't escape the economic impact of a much reduced passing trade. So we considered it our civic duty to make our second coffee stop the Grey Gum Cafe.

Motorcycles + curves = snail paced speed limits + police

The Putty is a road much loved by Sydney based motorcyclists because it's long, winding, scenic and has the Grey Gum Cafe. It also demonstrates another law of the universe: any road that attracts motorcyclists also attracts diminished speed limits and Highway Patrol vehicles to police those limits. After a cuppa (English Breakfast tea for me), conversation and a visor clean we continued North along the Putty road at a conservative pace.

The roadside vegetation on the Putty changes with topography, aspect and soil type - and we also saw significant variation in the ability of the vegetation to bounce back from the fires. Some areas that burnt looked vibrant and green, while other still looked blackened and dead in spite of recent rains.

Along the road to Gulgong

The coal mines of the Hunter Valley and Ulan provide our coal export industry with huge amounts of coal. The mines and rail lines that service them are visible from many of the roads we took between Bulga and the Bylong valley. Bylong Valley residents are concerned that homes and livelihoods will be lost when new mines are opened in their valley. We're not only concerned for the residents but also selfishly worried that some of our favourite motorcycle roads will be replaced by open cut coal mines. There is hope as a recent mine was refused approval because the coal mined from it would eventually be burnt adding millions of tonnes of CO2 into the earth's atmosphere. However, our State Government soon quashed that hope by putting forward legislation that will preclude Scope 3 (overseas) CO2 emissions from coal mined here to be taken into consideration when assessing an application to mine.

The locals are fighting hard and we should support them in any way that we can - here are some of the signs we saw in the Bylong Valley.

There should be an idiom that is the opposite of "a bad workman blames his tools" but I can't think of one.

The Road from Bylong through Lue to Mudgee is demanding - it's relatively narrow; poorly maintained with off camber and decreasing radius corners. Simon took the lead in this section and Peter and I had to ride the pants off our bikes to keep up with him. At a regroup stop on the corner of the Bylong Valley Way and Lue Road Simon had a big grin on his face and observed that had he been riding his old Guzzi on these roads his spine would have been rammed through the back of his head by the Guzzi's limited suspension. He couldn't wait to get going again and continued to set a challenging pace that saw us arrive in Gulgong just on sunset.

Do all country towns have a Commercial Hotel?

In small towns like Gulgong the pubs are usually located on the corners in the main street and the TAB Post Office Hotel Gulgong is a good example of such a corner pub, although its name leaves little to the imagination.

In this case the pub has a TAB - check, is located opposite the Gulgong Post office - check, it's a Hotel that sells beer - check and it's in Gulgong - check. I much prefer more romantic pub names such as The Commercial, The Centennial and the Prince of Wales - at least there is a certain amount of mystery surrounding what services you might find in The Commercial for example. Sadly we'll never know as The Commercial Hotel is closed awaiting sale - a bargain at $750,000. I'm not sure what the Prince of Wales or the Centennial have to offer - their names are unhelpful and the three of us were too hungry and thirsty to investigate. So the TAB Post Office Hotel Gulgong got the nod because it had beer, wine, steaks and tables - check.

Simon said that his scotch fillet steak was the best. Peter had T-bone and I had a rump steak: at least we think there were steaks under the great piles of grey flavourless sauce we made the mistake of ordering. Nonetheless we enjoyed a few glasses of red wine and good conversation facilitated by the fact that we could actually hear each other. Our 15 minute walk back to the Gulgong Tourist park, which is under new management in case you are wondering, was punctuated with exclamations about the number of stars that we could see with our unaided eyes in comparison to the light polluted skies over Sydney. But more on that later.

Go forward: day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5

For more on motorcycling, you might also be interested in:

3 Museums Ride - a 5 day museum crawl with my riding mates, Simon and Peter.

South American Adventure 2015: Santiago to Bariloche - the first installment on a 20 day ride with Compass Expeditions from Santiago, Chile to Ushuaia, Argentina.

Interested in a different adventure?

Follow Ian and Jacqui’s 1990 lap of Australia with 3 kids aged under 5.