Queen's Birthday Weekend

This weekend past was a long weekend, with the Monday off. Every day of it, I was out riding, the nights were spent indoors.

On Saturday, we went out to Windsor, and had a relaxed lunch out there at the seafood restaurant... the place seems very popular. We shopped, bought some books, and rode back home. It was a very tame ride, which is what we were after.

On Sunday, I went for a bit of a longer ride by myself. I set off in the afternoon, about 1pm, down towards Wollongong, through the Royal National Park, with a detour down to Garie Beach. I stopped there and ate the simple lunch I'd packed and snapped a few photos. There were quite a few people there, the small carpark was full, several people in the surf and a few people fishing off the beach a ways up.

After a brief rest, I continued on south along the coast. I was going through a windy bit of road in a heavily forested area, when I had my first near hit. It was out of the blue... I was riding along, when about 20m in front of me, a bird came fluttering out of a bush, bouncing along the ground. I could tell it was going just fast enough across the road to be a risk, and started to slow down, but didn't swerve... I think if I'd tried to swerve to avoid it I'd likely have dropped the bike or run off the road, or hit a car... there wasn't enough time to react properly, so I just braked. As I drew even with it, it leapt up into the air and struck the mirror of my bike, bounced off and struck me in the chest and flew over my right shoulder. I stopped as quickly as I could and got off and had a look, but I couldn't see it anywhere... I estimated I was doing about 40 km/h when we hit. The mirror was bent down but not broken. Hopefully it just got a fright and took off for the hills and wasn't hurt... there wasn't much I could do if it had been injured other than offer it a clean death. It gave me a bit of a fright... it was good that I wasn't going fast, I had just been pottering along at the speed limit of 60.

After remounting, shaken but not stirred, I continued my ride south. There is a bridge that tracks around the sea cliff on Lawrence Hargrave Dr. It was about 4pm that I took this photo. I dismounted after crossing the bridge and walked back along it a little to get a photo looking back north.

I made it down to just north of Wollongong, and it was starting to get dark. While I don't mind riding in the dark, there are few opportunities for decent photos with a small compact camera, and it starts getting unpleasantly cold. After that ride to Singleton, I've been dressing much warmer to ride and avoiding particularly cold rides. It kind of removes a lot of the fun of the ride when you're shaking violently enough the bike is vibrating from you, not the engine. So I turned around, and rather than take the windy road back along the coast, I shot up the highway and back into Sydney while the sun set.

I was passing Botany Bay, in Brighton le Sands, when I saw something that made me find a parking spot (the place was PACKED) and stop to try to get a decent photo in the dusk. It took me quite a few shots before I managed to hold the camera steady enough.


Out in the middle of Botany Bay there was a large platform, doing some kind of work in the middle of the bay. On the far side of the Bay was Mascot airport, with planes landing and taking off constantly. Residing over it all was the moon, bright and full.

One of my early memories, and one that comes back to me often, was sitting in the car, late at night, watching the moon and wondering how it moved so fast to keep up with us as we drove. The other three kids were all asleep, my parents were quiet, we were driving back from dinner party or something. We were living down in Point Cook. I remember thinking that the moon was travelling with us, keeping watch, keeping company as I travelled. Every time I'm travelling and there is a full moon, I always find myself staring at it, remembering that early feeling of it being there, and then remembering every time I've done that exact same thing, stared at the moon as I've walked, run, ridden, driven, flown... it will always be there when I do these things, always keeping pace... and it'll be there until long after I am no more. It is permanence, when everything in the world changes.