MONDAY 27 SEPTEMBER
First day on road –
Cycling day no.
Total day no:
Day XX
Distance
Weather: Hot Building to a storm later
Rode on freeway to Coffs Harbour. Made good progress given wide cycle path on most of verge. Had packed lunch at Russell Art Gallery – suffering because they cannot put up a sign on the main highway to attract visitors, whilst it Is littered with signs saying, Rest, Revive, Survive. Chris
Chris got off to an earlier start as I found myself dreading getting started after the big stop we had in Bellingen. I had connected so deeply with Olivia I found myself dragging my heels to pack and get ready to leave! It was a wonderful surprise to meet to have an immediate strong attraction to Olivia who is such a committed active, integral and passionate community oriented sustainability activist who welcomed both Chris and I into her home. Transition Bellingen & the community has a extraordinary valuable team member even if I am a bit bias! Added to this we hadn't been riding, or at least I hadn't (Chris had ridden up to Dorrigo & to Coffs harbour to check out the sites). I was content to chill (and thus started to pay for it when back on the bike) & to some extent stick my head in the sand with all that needed doing! Some how I seem to see a pattern here!
So it was quite hard for me to leave. Once on the road with a few tears and a heart full of emotion I slowly got up a rhythm. I caught up to Chris at a “rest stop” more like a “junk stop” for the petrol, caffeine, sugar & additive addictions of the contents of the sea of cars! I couldn't wait to get out of there and was so happy when we did. After a short visit to a bike shop we climbed out of Coffs and headed north. Dam it was hot. It is great to not be freezing but the warm weather is way more tiring.
Not long after catching up with Chris he said that he had another tooth that seemed to be playing up! I was immediately thinking, “What is going on... there must be something in this for Chris and I to connect with?” I said to him did he think that it needed more treatment and he said most likely as it was giving him a large amount of discomfort but that he said we should continue and asses it that night or the next day to see what we would need to do...
It was getting late and we needed a spot to stop for lunch and as I had a packed lunch we were on the look out for a good place. It is one of the pleasures of not racing along in a car that cyclists get to connect to the environment around them. I had stopped and said to Chris lets look out for a place to eat. The road looked very desolate so I was not so hopeful but only a few kilometers down the road looking to the left was lake or large dam through some trees with a sign saying art gallery & cafe. It was a wonderful oasis and a great place to share the packed lunch that Olivia had kindly pulled together and get a few coffees and a cake each! Roland
Old freeway alignment. Hillier. Less space for cyclists. Chris
Heading north had the road narrow and later it was up a reasonably steep hill. As it got later and closer to the 4pm witching hour of truck terror I started to get nervous.
Before now I knew that there are a lot of trucks on the road. When I have driven on the Pacific Hwy (1) I have seen lots of trucks but I have been travelling about the same speed as the trucks so the ones that we passed were only a fraction of those on the road! Now I really have a better idea of just how many.rom about 3:30 – 4pm onwards many times there have been trucks passing us every 30 -60 seconds! If you times that by the 100km per hour speed they are traveling and the 4000+km of roads on the busiest sections of the main roads in the eastern states of Queensland, New South Wales & Victoria you start to realise just how many trucks there are. We are talking anything up to 100,000 or even more trucks on the road every night! Most of these are double articulated (B-Double Semi Trailer Lorries). To get an idea of just how big these are, one carrying standard sedan cars can carry 14-16 cars with a standard city car length being about the same length as the back sets of wheels! These travel at 100km per hour often with sets of 3 or 4 getting as close together as possible to slip stream (travel in the wind shadow of the front truck) so as to save fuel! This means that they may not have time to avoid something if the front truck suddenly swerves either way. The biggest trucks are the freighters which are “two trailers and a total length of 25 or 26 metre - with permits from state authorities - (82 ft to 85 ft), 62.5 ton (137,788 lb) B-doubles are very common in all parts of Australia including state capitals and on major routes may outnumber single trailer configurations. ” and these are the other approximate dimensions from North American “102 inches (2.6 m) wide, 13.5 feet (4.1 m) feet in height” ! In other words DAM BIG! For more info here is another wiki link
So now imagine a box the length of 6-7 sedan cars & stacked at least 3 high and then imagine more than 100,000 of them full of stuff
I just had a vision of a transport system. Say you want to travel to Brisbane from Melbourne. People either own their own electric vehicle, that if it was system compatible it would have positive cost implications (cheaper registration, travel – ie tolls etc, energy & maintenance), or were part of a service that provided them a range of vehicles such that these were parked every where in such numbers that they were freely available, with inter-deals between providers providing discounts for brand loyalty, that when you arrived at the car your personal communication device allowed you access to the car, personalised it to you & your tastes (colour, sounds, even smells & driving devices – mirrors + seat position etc) that you could then either drive manually or tell it where to go and it would take you by the route suggested or the one you choose. This could take you take you to the local train station then either actually joins the tram / light rail if it's your own vehicle or you leave the car share vehicle at the station and board the train which then takes you to a the local train hub where you connect to a medium distance train or the fast hig speed train which tales you all the way to Brisbane. When boarding the train your communication device allows you to pay for your ticket, check in, custom your seat position / comfort & your entertainment choices delivered to your personal headphones or directional zone speak system so that others dont need to listen to your audio with the screen for visual in the back of the chair in front, a retractable screen or screens built into our glasses / sunglasses. Once at the station you get out, connect with other smaller more local mass transport, chose another car-share vehicle or detach and continue your journey....
I am imagining more but maybe if someone wants to ask me to continue my vision of a possible future world then do so and I will? Roland
7km to the left from Half Way Creek is the Nature Philosophy Centre founded on the principles of Tom Brown on Montana Five students were being taught how live off the land, collecting fruits, skinning road kill, and using the brains to tan the hides, growing veg, chooks, and how to make fire with a bow, string, and other wood. http://www.naturephilosophy.com/About%20us.html
Stayed the night there. Camping in a forest clearing. No electricity. Lit fire for hot water under the bath, and a fire in front of where we had taken our chicken and chips bought from the petrol station 10km away.
Compost toilets. The best I have come across anywhere in the world. No smell at all, and no flies, unlike so often in Africa. B
Rain. Chris
Once off the main road it was a race as darkness fell to get to Nature Philosophy property before dark and before the approaching rain. Made it just in time and got to have, dinner by the fire, a cuppa under cover with one of the participants in the year long residential program who had previously ridden around Australia on a bicycle, fire bath after the rain passed with the stars peaking through before retiring to bed. Chris's teeth were still paining him and he said that he thought that we would need to see about going to a dentist asap. His immediate thought was to head back to Bellingen but this was a full days ride back the way we came! This was really challenging for me but hadn't thought about how else to manage this and moving forward to keep the event we had planned for Thursday in Lismore (100km north!). Left it hanging to see how things were in the morning. More rain later though & Chris has a troubled sleep with his teeth and his camping mat going down over night with a leak!
Nature philosophy takes sustainability to a new level. Besides the short courses that build on basic skills they also offer one year residential programs. Yes one year where you build your own shelter from natural materials, collect and grow your own food, create fire by hand without matchers, a lighter or flint and steel. Collect your own water supplemented by infrequent basics. This may seem as an extreme form or returning to a bygone time but as they are not suggesting every one do this and but open to and see the value of learning this level of personal reliance it seems to me that it is about individuals really getting in touch with what it really means to be sustainable and responsible for every thing in their lives. Food, clothes, shelter, fire, water, utensils, containers and more made & processed by hand from naturally occurring + some found urban materials and some from the impact of nature with urban infrastructure. It also is a way for these individuals to strip away the conditions, conditioning and understandings of our contemporary world and then replace this it with the personally learnt skills, knowledge & understanding of what it really takes to really survive / rely on ones self who for almost everything! Spending one year doing this may not be every ones “cup of tea” but definitely worth acknowledging and respecting for the commitment to personal integrity and responsibility.
I am inspired to do this when I return as I feel that maybe some time to be static, self contained and grounded literally as well as metaphorically would be good. But the shorter courses to learn the basics. Although I have been interested in this before the ride it could also be being coloured by a very pale tinge of “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” at the moment
Roland
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