Day 03 – Sun, 4 Jul to Carnarvon Gorge

Well the music at the St George pub went on and on last night. The Bismark should have been sunk many times over by the number of times they played that song.

The volume was turned down at midnight but I could still hear it using my bike ear plugs. I did sleep off and on, but my roomie Rod put out the Zzzzzz’z at a great pace. But at 2am everything was switched off and I think they threw the remaining patrons out of the pub – well they at least left.

So peace was had for a few hours. At 5:30am the pub fire alarm sounded and everyone was up. Well going out into the hallway and seeing the other residents was not a pretty sight, even in my half stupor I was not really too oriented.

Mr. Rod (having had a great night’s sleep) was like the real boy scout, He had his bike gear on in a flash and was ready to evacuate with all his gear. Your’s truely was still trying to work out what was going on. Anyway the alarm that triggered the whole thing was found – and yeah it was a false alarm. So we decided as it was freezing and still dark out that we would try to get a little more sleep.

At precisely 6am the fire alarm went off again so this time we decided to stay up and get moving. So by almost 7:45 we were on the road.

Well the trip out of Dodge was not as quick as expected. With temperatures at almost zero, frost on the ground, a heavy fog over the road and our bike’s black ice warning flashing, progress was slow. This went on for an hour and we had a good lookout for our friend skippy who we thought was lurking behind every bush.

Eventually the day warmed, we had morning tea at Surat and caught up with a local Harley rider who was complaining about the cold, it was now a balmy 10C – “not too many bends out this way” was his main comment. Eventually into Roma where we visited the Big Rig – a museum to the search for oil & gas in the area – Roma still supplies Brisbane with natural gas to this day.

After lunch – where we took a photo of us eating pies outside the Bakearoma (pie & pastry shop) and sent it to Mr. Barnes (the missing member of Team Zantac) – we headed for our 2 night stop at the Gorge.

A fabulous 240km ride through plains then forested areas until the final 12km of gravel into the Takarakka Bush Resort where we are now residing in our first night of camping under the stars.

We are camped in the macrozamia grove area of the camp. These macrozamia palms are all around and they only grow at 30cm every 100 years, So these plants around us are at least a thousand years old – a little humbling. We’re residing hear for 2 nights to do some walking tomorrow and some rest time.

Todate I have ridden around 1400km – so the km’s are passing. Assessment after just 3 days – just terrific looking forward to the whole trip.