The Road Less Travelled (Where the hell have we been?)

I also quite like to explore the “road less travelled”. Every time I see a side road leading to who knows where my curiosity is aroused. What might there be over that hill, across that river or beyond the horizon? I truly hope people understand this mindset because if I have to explain it you will never understand. To me it is innate in our DNA. So when a link popped up on social media to a guy offering a GPS route for a mostly off road ride from the Victorian border to Stanthorpe in Qld and return, I smashed that Buy Now button like a five year old on Red Bull.

Tobacco drying barns. I once lived in a beaut old house made by joining two of these together.

The GPS track was broken into sections, each with a difficulty rating from one to ten, one being freeway and ten being the most implausibly difficult stretch of boulder strewn vertical mountain side complete with slippery moss, quick sand and dragons. Most sections are also colour coded to give a quick visual representation of degree of difficulty. I tended to stick with the green and yellow bits as I am definitely not in the Dakar Rally league and nor is the bike. In fact it is more at home traversing whole continents in a single bound than it is bouncing around bush tracks but we make do.

To reach the beginning of the programmed tracks I indulged in a little random exploration of my own and came across several interesting roads and a couple of brilliant campsites. As the actual course progressed I realised that it passed within a few dozen kilometres of the homes of old friends so I dropped in unannounced. With only a little more planning I was able to score a bed for the night at each of my two brother’s homes. But the real attraction of the trip was finding new back roads that I previously did not know existed and being able to link them all together in a single eight day loop around the Great Dividing Range of NSW. Many of you can probably think of many, many things you would rather be doing but for me it is heaven.

After returning home and with that track now permanently stored up in my very cluttered Garmin GPS I almost immediately signed up for a Horizons Unlimited weekend get together in, you guessed it, Queensland. This time I went to the trouble of alerting friends and family along the way that I would be passing by. Surprisingly, only a few of them ran away and hid, so I was able to make a leisurely stroll out of the whole trip, dropping in for a coffee and even a bed occasionally. I even managed to spend a night camped in the most splendid patch of paradise I know. It is my ancestral home, the place my father was born, just a few miles from where I lived the first ten years of my life and the only place on Earth where I truly feel at home. Just check the photos below.

The Horizons Unlimited weekend itself was held at a camp ground near Laidley, west of Brisbane and was attended by about fifty of the most hardcore adventurers anywhere in the world. They live by the motto “Probably a terrible idea but lets go anyway”. The adventures Sally and I have had pale into insignificance by comparison. I genuinely felt inadequate in their presence. There were our good friends, Cindy and Duncan (aka The Travelling Bennetts) veterans of trans continental trips on 5 continents, or is it 6? I met new friends Sasha and Bec who go by the slogan “Two chicks two up” and gave a riveting presentation of their exploits around Europe on a hopelessly overloaded Honda CB500. There were presentations from people who have crisscrossed Australia many times. There was a couple who told the harrowing story of their near death experience in Himalayan Nepal after a simple crash on a remote mountain. There were several others but my personal hero is the guy who has ridden his Harley to every country in the UN. That’s 193 countries in case you were wondering. Problem is they keep adding new ones but he is satisfied now. He is not even thinking about going to South Sudan just to tick boxes. Even more remarkable is the fact that his wife has been to 180+ of them with him.

I contemplated making the return 1750 km journey in one day, but a late start, some rain and the fact my headlights were pointing skyward and resisting all attempts to readjust made me call it a day in West Wyalong then complete the final 750 ish km the next day.

So the riding itch has been scratched for the time being, 7,500 km in a month can do that but rest assured there will be plenty more to come soon enough. My good mate Scott is putting together a ten to twelve week trip around USA, Canada and Alaska (yes I know it’s part of the USA) for this time next year so much of my time is consumed with trying to make that work for me. Before that I have vague plans to do interesting trips on Olga my Russian Ural sidecar. Sally has once again given tacit approval for me to go out and play unsupervised. But meanwhile the departure date for Mongolia is rapidly approaching so WATCH THIS SPACE!