No prizes for guessing. My favourite town on the North Coast, Port Macquarie.
Now before someone accuses me of having a girlfriend up here and finding myriad excuses for visiting her, such is not the case at all. The circumstances are a bit bizzare, so please bear with me.
In “Raining on our Parade” a couple of days ago, I noted that my proposed Snowy tour was looking pretty unlikely given the SES’s published warnings of bad weather in the area. Well, no surprise, Chris called me on Thursday and told me the ride had been canned and re-scheduled for a few weekends hence.
But my S-I-L had already arranged to have today off so he could ride the long weekend and I knew he was going to be disapppointed if he didn’t get to do his first-ever tour on his new (to him) ZX-6R (how come I often end up in a group with a mini-Ninja?) so I decided that we’d do a two person tour this weekend to make up for it.
And, I kid you not, the only area of NSW that looked to be without the possibility of rain, hail, cyclonic storms or a possible tidal wave, was the mid-north coast.
So we set out this morning with the intention of making Port Mac this evening. It took an unbelieveable 2 hours to filter through the Sydney mayhem and reach Hornsby. And it was punishingly hot into the bargain. A pie and refreshment at PiTS certainly helped then it was on up the Old Road and out onto the freeway at Gosford. Now there is nothing quite so mind-numbingly boring as the F3, but we suffered it till Raymond Terrace where we cut out onto Bucketts. Stroud, Gloucester, Tinonee and back out onto the F3 at Taree, at least we had some sort of break from the monotony. And while we were having a drink at Tinonee a southerly came through so the last part of the trip was much more pleasant. I wasn’t looking forward to crawling through the 40kms of road works from Coopernook to Herrons Creek if the temperature was still going to be in the high 30’s. Fortunately it wasn’t and we arrived, still a bit hot and certainly weary, at Port around 1800.
Leith did a super job for his first-ever long ride. 544kms in a day on a sportsbike is pretty impressive anyway, but to do it having never attempted anything like that before deserves some praise I think.
Tomorrow it’s the Oxley (of course) and then we’ll see how he pulls up after that and decide what we’re going to do with the rest of the weekend.
Touring, gotta love it.
