The party's over, time to get back to work!

Well it's back to work for me. No time to enjoy the festive season, it's back to the coal face for this little black duck. I hope you all had a great Christmas.

P

A bit of Exploring...

I thought I'd take the opportunity to do a some exploring of the fire trails around Hanging Rock for some future MTB riding next time I was up this way. There wasn't anything too technical around, but there were plenty of climbs, a great place to train for the "Highland Fling". Plenty of long, long ascents (and plenty steep at times) on pretty slippy surfaces at times, clay, gravel, rocks.

Michiel and Dave already to fire up for a Boxing Day Breakie.

Merry Christmas to all.

It was a cold and wet Christmas Day up in Hanging Rock (NSW, AUS) this year. But cheer, gifts and good food still made the day. When the skys finally cleared a bit, it was a good opportunity to take the bike out for a bit of a spin. So I didnn't feel totally guilty about all the food consumed. :-)

Christmas @ Hanging Rock

Xmas 2006

Hanging Rock

Welcome to "Hanging Rock" a small hamlet set 1100mtrs above sea level in the Great Dividing Range (approx 5.5 hrs North West of Sydney). The nearest major centre is Tamworth (an hour away). The area is well known for it's gold mining history in the 1800's, today it's predomitory farming (Cattle) and forrest plantations.

The GT is back.

Finally after 2 months waiting (after the accident) for the fellow to finally submit a claim to the insurance company, the GT is back.

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

5 Days to go... Despite the hectic pace at work, I actually have managed to sort nearly all my chrissie presents. Who say's miracles aren't real?

Sun and Surf on Sunday

The weather man said it would raining, but hey, when have you ever listened to them. The day was fantastic, a near cloudless day, and there was a nice breeze to cool it down a little, and the water was perfect. The occsasion for me being there were my friends at the bike shop had their Christmas Party over on Manly Point. A great way to wind down over the last week.

Another hot one at Yarramundi

The Western Sydney MTB Club www.wsmtb.com ran it's last event for the year, a 4 hour race yeaterday. The usual issues at registration meant that the 8AM start, turned into a 8:45AM start. The course was a less technical than usual for the enjoyment of "all" riders.

The usual suspects from CBD www.citybikedepot.com.au were there. Again the day started overcast, but by 9:30 the clouds had disapated and the sun was shining in all it's glory, it turned out to be a great day to be at the beach, not so good if you wanted to ride around the bush. While it was nice to be outdoors and riding, my lack of saddle time and riding mojo for the day meant that I wasn't as enthusiastic about going around the circuit as much as I like. But I did manage to complete 5 laps ( 8.4kms) in 4hr23min as a "Solo" rider, which I was please about.

Jasper and I

After a bit of light exercise, I decieded to take my four legged nephew out on a walk aroung the bay. After a hesitent start (Jasper decided to just stop for no reason) he decided to behave himself especially after he was able to go for a dip in the bay. As the walk went on, I got more comfortable with my ability to call Jasper back if required, I tried walking him off his leash, having some doggie snacks in my pocket also helped. :-) I was surprised that he kept up a pretty quick pace.

Urban Polaris - Canberra

This was to be my first "Urban Polaris" and the excitement was mounting. Mark (my team mate), Alastair and Nick were also joining in the day, it all started at 5:30AM at the Canberra Youth Hostel. By 6:15AM we had registered to find out that our starting group was at 9:20AM, we were a bit miffed with 3 hour wait. Well what does one do for 3hrs. Funnily enough 3 hour's was just the right amount of time for us to work out where the control points were on the map, get our bike ready to go and sneak in some breakfast.

At 9:20AM we finally start, and with much confidence we head out through the gates and made a left hand turn too wards our first control point. About 8km's into our ride our plans seemed a bit shakey at 15km's it was time to be concerned, considering we had initally calculated the control to be only 12km's away (max). We did eventually reach a control point (the furtherest one for the entire event), but we had no idea where it was on the map. We eventually why we couldn't see it, because it wasn't actually on the map we had. It was on one of the additional handouts. Not a good start, considering all the hills we had to ride to get there. But after a good laugh about our mistake (which we had no idea how we made) we headed back. That cost us an hour of riding time, but did collect 40 points. We did eventually make the right turn and headed of to our planned route. The rest of the day went more to plan, we rode along bikepaths, motorways and fire trials. We seemed to do a lot of hill climbs, the maps we were given didn't have any contour lines marked so we had no real idea what the terrian was like. We stayed north of the city centre, I have a feeling that the south was a little flatter, I'll have to remember that for next year.

So 6hr43min, 96km, 13 controls and 210 points later, the day was done.


"The Battlefield"

Making our battle plans. Note to self, read all the documentation before you start.

The view from the top of "Black Mountain Tower"

Finally back home.