2024-03-12 -37 144

Location

In a garden bed in Royal Botanic Gardens, just outside Melbourne's CBD.

Participants

Expedition 1:

John

Expedition 2:

Stevage
KT

Expedition 2

I definitely couldn't turn down a geohash in one of my favourite places, the Botanic Gardens, a pretty amazing wonderland of plants great and small. The weather had dropped about 600 degrees from the sweltering weekend, although it was traded for a very sticky humidity.

KT was on a train from Ballarat, so I waited a bit to sync up, falling down a weird YouTube hole of blackjack card-counting videos. Eventually I launched and steamrolled the direct route south into the city. A slight strategic error to ride through Birrarung Marr, the rather pleasant banks of the Yarra River, which was undergoing a massive Moomba (festival) hangover. I dodged trucks and carnival rides for a bit until I made it up to St Kilda Road, which was surprisingly peaceful.

KT duly emerged from a tram, disguised as a train driver. She suggested cutting across and up the grassy slope, I suggested continuing to the footpath marked on the map, she pointed out that it was actually steps, I didn't listen, and was surprised to discover that it was actually steps, whereupon we decided that walking up the grassy slope was a great idea after all.

I locked up my bike at the visitor centre and we strode boldly in, with NaviKT taking charge and leading us to the point. Somewhat anti-climactically the app suddenly told me I had reached the point while we still on the footpath, but I chose to ignore it, so we could experience the illicit thrill of trying to stealthily enter a forbidden garden bed while wearing an eye-searingly bright orange backpack. It was worth it.

We strode back out, collected my bike, and bid each other a fond farewell.

Then I attempted an overambitious manoeuver in which I tried to reposition the pannier that was slung around my neck back onto the rear rack while cycling in a bike lane and cocked it up completely, leaving the pannier in the path and me looking like a dill. No one seemed to notice, or at least they were too polite to say anything.

Moments later I arrived at Flinders Street Station, and ordered a piece of pizza, whereupon surprise KT arrived again upon the scene. I filled her in on all the drama she had missed in the 4 minutes since we had last seen each other, then we went through the whole fond farewell process again. We must have done it better this time, because, at the time of this writing, I haven't seen her since.