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RE: The best laid schemes … gang aft agley
Part 3—In which Cormanus survives a poor choice and makes it home
Reaching the car park, I got back into my riding gear. The bike started without pain, meaning I could move on from the battery saga, and I rode out avoiding a very large waste disposal truck busily emptying the sort of remote storage areas with which it’s better not to come in contact.
The morning, while not a disaster by any means, had not gone according to plan and I’d had lunch where I’d expected to have morning tea. Clearly the afternoon’s ride would have to be curtailed. What to do?
When planning the ride I’d discovered Duck Creek Road on the map. It would take me down from O’Reilly’s north-west rather than north into a valley close to where I could scoot across the Queensland-New South Wales border on one of my favourite roads and then head home. A bit of research had shown it was a dirt road. That wasn’t a problem: I don’t mind a bit of dirt riding, but I wasn’t completely sure of its condition and, at that time, I thought it might be a bit slow compared to retracing my steps and then heading south. Now, however, I could amuse myself with a bit of dirt and then make my way home.
At about that point in my musings I came to the start of Duck Creek Road.
I sat there for a bit, deciding whether to retrace my steps or try the dirt.
Having decided it hadn’t rained properly for ages and that if it started to deteriorate, I could turn around and come back, I set off into the bush.
Duck Creek Road is one of those roads finished by community effort rather than by government or local government; but, so is the Lions Road which I’ve travelled a number of times.
I like the idea of a do-it-yourself road
It’s a pretty enough road, with some great views:
And so it continued for a time. There was the odd rough patch, but ways around them and the CB was handling it all with aplomb. Two 4WDs came up behind me and I pulled over to let them past. The bloke in the front one yelled out the window, ‘Right mate?’. ‘Yes,” I replied, and they went on their way.
It’s said that if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and bring it to the boil, it doesn’t really notice the change in temperature and is cooked without great display of suffering. I’ve not put it to the test, but I now have a sense of what it might feel like. There was a moment when it dawned on me that, not only was the condition of Duck Creek Road getting worse, but turning around and heading back was no longer a serious option.
I was, you might say, cooked! That feeling of prickly heat you get when you know you’ve overreached yourself and wonder how on earth you’re going to get out of it erupted in my jacket for the first of a number of occasions.
Sections like these became more common and the paths through them became more difficult to negotiate. The road was also becoming steeper. I’d find myself stopping to work out the way through a section and then hoping that I could get my foot up and the brakes properly engaged in time to make it. The angle plus gravel plus narrowness of path plus the odd large rock made it a much trickier road than I want to ride on a bike as large and heavy as the CB1100.
The worst moment came when, half way down a steep section I came to a closed gate. It occurred to me that the blokes in the 4WDs might have closed it deliberately, but I quickly dismissed such an uncharitable thought. There was no way around it and to get through it, I had to turn the CB around so I could park it, get off, open the gate, turn around again, get through the gate, turn around to park, close the gate and then, finally turn around to keep going.
I turned to park to open the gate and thought I was stuck. The road surface wasn’t bad at that point, but my front wheel was right against the bank on one side with a slight ditch just behind it. I couldn’t for the life of me push the bike up the back side of the ditch enough to be able to turn it. I was worried that using the motor to see-saw my way through would eventually shoot me out of the ditch too fast and I’d come off when I tried to stop. Nor could I get off without putting the bike down which I simply was not going to do unless gravity, mishap or exhaustion forced me to it. I tried three or four times, pausing to rest between. I was too concerned even to curse. Eventually I managed to get just far enough away from the bank to be able to turn, just clear a rock and get back up the hill.
The CB pointing uphill as I walked back from opening the gate.
I thought about leaving the gate open, but years of school holidays mucking about on farms had drummed into me that you always leave a gate as you find it, so I didn’t.
There was another moment of stopping to negotiate a rough and slippery passage where I thought there was a good chance either the CB or I or both of us would hurtle over the edge of the road into an uncertain period of being airborne. We made it and not terribly long afterwards, I came to a gate at the end of the road.
The surface improved; but, better than that, it was only a few minutes until I was again on a sealed road which took me to the outskirts of Beaudesert. It may have been one of the best rides of my life. As the relief of having made it intact through an act of remarkable stupidity surged through my veins and the narrow, largely deserted, country road with its generally good surface unwound before me, I settled the bike at the speed limit and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
The ride home was pleasantly uneventful.
Ride4now, if you’re reading, it must have been the Gremlin Bell that brought me through. There was the odd scrape underneath on the way down, but it survived. Thank you.
I wouldn’t have enjoyed that road much on a dirt bike. I know in my bones I’m not a good enough rider. It was ambitious, shall we say, to ride it on a CB1100, although it rose to the occasion with aplomb. I’m sure its excellent front brakes applied often and gently were one of the factors in my getting through safely.
On the up side, I didn’t fall off; I did have yet another memorable day on the CB. And, in the road from Canungra to O’Reilly’s, I discovered another great riding road.
Some days after these events, and quite coincidentally, I read a post on the Australian Netrider forum in which the writer offered the opinion that, … a dirt bike is like a dildo. Anything can be one if you're brave enough. Or stupid enough, I guess!
Should you want to read the ride report in which that observation is contained, it’s [url=https://netrider.net.au/threads/trip-up-to-the-snowies-part-1.230775/]here. The writer’s not a bad story teller and it has a funny, if not terribly savoury episode involving a curious egg which has a neat dénouement towards the end.
And then, when I was writing this report, I came across Django’s [url=http://cb1100forum.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=9478]post about his plans for next year which led me to the aptly named site [url=http://www.dangerousroads.org/]Dangerous Roads. Had I known about and consulted the site it would have told me simply: Duck Creek Road is a gravel road located in the Lamington National Park, on the Queensland/New South Wales border in Australia.
The road is 15,4 kilometers long. The unpaved sections of the road can be impassable when wet. (see [url=http://www.dangerousroads.org/australia-and-oceania/australia/3981-duck-creek-road.html]here).
I probably would still have been an idiot and ridden it!
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The best laid schemes … gang aft agley
Good on 'ya!