38
JUNE 2021
By Duncan Bennett, Member #4171
UP - TASMANIA PART 3
D
ay 21. A Sunday. The 4:45am awakening is an 8 on the scale between rude and harsh, closer to the harsh end because they are quite polite. No calling in sick from a cabin on the Spirit of Tasmania though, it’s down and at ‘em on the vehicle deck. Bags jammed into panniers, let others know that the crew only put the tie-down straps on, they won’t take them off, and get ready for riding out into the darkness. One poor chap had forgotten about the rubber band holding the front brake on and doesn’t recognise that his back wheel is spinning wildly, why isn’t it moving? Soon we are out into the Melbourne pre-dawn, with caffeine joining air at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid – food and shelter could wait, and water is actually part of the sought-after long black with pouring cream on the side anyway.
All un-aboard Breakfast with great mates Adrian and Hera from the 2017 Cairo to Cape Town trip got the day off to a good start. Exactly 4 years previously we’d all been in Botswana, happily asleep before a day of mixing it up with meerkats. Croissants demolished and the field of flakes swept from the table and Klim creases, we headed out into the appropriately bright sunlight for the day’s journey to Bright. How to get to Bright without involving the Hume Freeway? The problem with planning the return on a major journey is that Garmin Basecamp motivation is at rock-bottom, the effort getting down has left nothing in reserve for getting back up. Google Maps to the rescue, if we put Kinglake in surely that is far enough east to make the GPS forget all about the Hume? Let’s give the GPS full control!
Proof of GPS insanity, the Kinglake Black Saturday Memorial After the slog through the ‘burbs - I recall stopping at traffic lights 16,000 times and Cindy thinks it was 18 times - the Kinglake waypoint seemed in sight as we motored up the optimistically named Heidelberg – Kinglake Road. Then the GPS decided that was too easy and it directed us onto a side road. The GPS screen only allows you to see the small picture so trust is the key to the relationship, maybe the side road is more direct and we are taking a shortcut across a loop? Then it turned us onto a dirt road, and I was starting to feel like I was doing a trust fall into a group of 4 year olds.
To Kinglake via the sane way (yellow) and the insane GPS way (red) This must be a totally awesome shortcut I was still thinking as the road meandered through
