2020-06-07 -38 146

Location

On a road out of the town of Mirboo North, on Day 2 of a 3 day cycle tour of the Strzlecki Ranges.

Participants

Expedition

Ruth and I were on a three day cycle tour of the Strzlecki Ranges, south-east of Melbourne, enjoying the start of the easing of camping restrictions. I'd worked out the route in high-detail before the geohashes had come out. But then they did.

It was the evening of the first day when I checked the weekend's hashes. The plan was to skirt around the hilltop town of Mirboo North for the second day but a hash, almost directly on a road 3 kms outside Mirboo North, changed all that. Instead, we would ride directly into Mirboo North, then turn off to take the small road out of town to the hash. The price was a section of rail trail that would make the journey too long for the day. It was a price worth paying.

The journey into the town was during a beautiful, sunny (but cold) winter's morning, surrounded by dairy farms and rolling hills. The ride to the hash was even simpler, downhill along a sealed road. We stopped as the metres ticked down to our final approach.

The hash itself was just up the side of a small embankment, right on the barb-wire fenced property boundary of a farm. I clambered up and stuck my arm into the zone, getting my phone to within 600 millimetres from the vertical line of the exact geohash. I took some photos of the surrounding area - the road, the narrow valley it traced, a small dam on someone's property - and headed back down to our bikes. We rode back up the hill and had lunch at Mirboo North's Grand Ridge Brewery, warming ourselves at the fire.

With a hash under our belts the rest of the day became more epic. We continued along the Strzlecki's Grand Ridge Rd, watching the bitumen become first narrower and then non-existent before degrading into ruts and rocky corrigations. Just before sunset, when the air was significantly cooling, we turned off even that road and headed down a debris-strewn track into the Morwell River valley to our benighted campsite buried within the temperate rainforest.

Here is the Strava trace of the 80 km ride for the day.