(G)Rumblin’ through Queensland—or (P)Terodactyl’s Terrible Trip

[Cormanus]

Day 1—On which Cormanus heads south-west



[url=https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-26.1936066,148.1928126,6.5z/data=!4m2!6m1!1sz5L5SB6CRw2M.kBqZs40j1Ncc?hl=en]The Map of the entire trip can be found here.

Saturday 23 April was a glorious autumn morning. I was on the CB1100 headed for Texas and it was much more agreeable riding weather than the [url=http://cb1100forum.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=8001]previous trip.


Heading off

This time, Texas was but a filling station on my way to Bingara in northern New South Wales where I’d meet up with Pterodactyl for a week’s adventuring in bits of Queensland I’ve not been before.

Since escaping the Solomon Islands in February, I’d been looking forward to a ride with Pterodactyl. I’d rung him to propose a date and he confessed to just having signed on for the [url=http://www.rumblersanzacride.com]Rumblers Anzac Ride through bits of central Queensland. He was keen as it would take him back to some places he hadn’t visited for many a year. And he’d laid out $50 for the pleasure. What could I do? I sighed of course, then signed on, paid my $50 and agreed to meet Pterodactyl a day early so we could ride to Taroom for the start of the ride.


It was a glorious morning as I hit the Centenary Highway

There’s nothing much new to describe in this part of the trip. I took to the highways to get myself south reasonably quickly. It’s pretty enough, but mostly straight and there are a few cars. But soon the Border ranges loom in the distance.



And then you’re through Aratula, climbing towards Cunningham’s Gap and looking at the range that gives the Scenic Rim its name.





Even though the Gap is at a modest 2,500 feet, it was surprisingly cool as I went through the pass and I was glad to get off the bike for fuel and coffee at Warwick. I didn’t quite need fuel, but I wanted to make it to Texas.

My original plan had been to repeat the ride to Stanthorpe and then across to Texas. I’d enjoyed the road and I was keen to ride it again. However, as I drank my coffee I decided it’s always a good idea to look at alternatives and decided on a different route that would see me turning off the Cunningham Highway just west of Oman Ama.

In an attempt to maintain some level of neuronic activity as I age, I try not to rely on a GPS when riding, particularly in rural areas where it usually isn’t too hard to find turn offs. This day was no different and the GPS wasn't running. So, of course, I missed the turn off and ended up in Inglewood a little further along the road.


At a comfort stop (for the rider) between Warwick and Inglewood

No problems, I thought, there’s a good road from Inglewood to Texas.

It’s an excellent road. Great surface, good visibility, but straight as a die and as boring as batsh*t as you can see in the next picture.



‘Get used to it Cormanus,’ I thought, ‘many of the roads you’ll ride on this trip will have that many curves!’

Fifty or so kilometres later I had refuelled and was eating lunch in Texas.


Parked at the lunch stop at Texas. For younger readers, the curious object behind the pole is a telephone box: an artefact of civilisation now largely redundant. In the days before the ubiquitous mobile phone it was a critical centre of communication.


Shortly after leaving Texas, I was over the Dumresq River and into New South Wales.

During long weekends in Australia (and this was one, of which I’ll have more to say later) local State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers provide ‘driver revivers’ designed to reduce road accidents brought about by fatigue. The volunteers set up somewhere with an urn full of boiling water, a jar of instant coffee, a box of tea bags, milk, sugar, polystyrene cups and biscuits. The then stick up clumsily drawn but charming signs to invite you to stop. Drivers who do stop are rewarded with a free drink and biscuit and are invited to make a donation to help the work of the SES.

The SES is an amalgam of state government employees and a much larger number of volunteers who turn out during periods of crisis and havoc to provide welcome community assistance. If, for example, there’s an appalling hailstorm and roofs are damaged, it’s the SES that’ll turn out to patch them and provide emergency assistance. It’s an important organisation and well worth chucking a few bob at.

Arriving in Warialda, south and west of Texas, I needed a comfort stop. I stopped at the local driver reviver. Three or four middle-aged women were sitting around in a deserted shelter shooting the breeze and one of them got up to make me a cup of tea. Another appeared to clean up while I drank my tea and we talked about important stuff like the weather and how dry it was and where I’d come from and was going.

Then we talked about their pet gecko, who did not seem to me to be in peak condition. We picked it off the bench and tried to feed it some water and a biscuit crumb. I’m not sure it was destined to be with us for too much longer.


The Warialda gecko

I wandered off to finish my tea and another bike pulled in. John, a middle-aged bloke on a Kawasaki Ninja 300, had recently got his driver’s licence and was out and about improving his skills. We chatted for a bit and I admired his bike before he headed off, slightly erratically I thought, pleased he was improving his skills in a small country town.

Half an hour or so later I was rumbling across the bridge over the Gwydir River and into Bingara where I was to meet Pterodactyl.



I poked about for somewhere to camp before making my way into town for a coffee and a brief wait until Pterodactyl arrived.





After refuelling for an easy getaway in the morning, we explored camping options in consultation with some clever app on Pterodactyl’s phone and a conversation with a local oracle before deciding on the local caravan park.


It was a short walk to the local hostelry where the barmaid was amiable, the beer cool and the food acceptable. Even better, there was a half-decent red to be found and we enjoyed a chat about this, that and motorcycles before Pterodactyl unburdened himself about the first two elements of his terrible trip.

The first was that he’d been caught in terrible, terrible rain the day before to the point that he could not pitch his tent and had to camp in someone’s shed he found by the way.

The second was that his much-loved Bose noise-cancelling headphones had developed a ghastly squeal that was beginning to make wearing them an ordeal as they screamed at his left ear every time he hit a bump or a large truck passed by.

I consoled him with another red before we took a gentle stroll back to our camp. We tested out portable chairs over a glass of [url=https://www.stonesoriginal.com.au/our-products/stone-s-mac]Stones Mac—a concoction Pterodactyl carries in case of emergency—before retiring.

[Nemo_imp]

Excellent!

[flynrider]

Great start, Cormanus! This one appears destined to be another ride report classic.

BTW, every time you say that you're riding to Texas, I get an image of something like this :



It's no surprise that the above pic is Aussie rider Robbie Maddison.

[Cormanus]

Day 2—On which Cormanus and Pterodactyl head north and the noise in the Pterodactyl’s ear worsens

[url=http://postimage.org/]
[url=https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-26.1936066,148.1928126,6.5z/data=!4m2!6m1!1sz5L5SB6CRw2M.kBqZs40j1Ncc?hl=en]The Map of the entire trip can be found here.

It was another glorious morning as we cooked oats on our respective stoves. Pterodactyl produced a paper sachet which, when emptied and added to water, made cappuccino. He topped it off with a spoonful of powdered chocolate that appeared from somewhere. This is camping in style.

I, on the other hand, made do with a tasteless tea bag of ‘hart’ Earl Grey tea. I don’t know what it is about Earl Grey tea, but it seems to have gone to the dogs. It no longer tastes as I remember it, even when carefully brewed in a pot with leaves. Tea bags, of course, are ghastly things, generally made with the dust swept up from the tea factory floor. Handy when camping, but little use for anything much else.

Well, that's not completely true. I remember going down a mine once where the crib room ceiling was festooned with used tea bags, their strings hanging like flimsy stalagmites. The trick, apparently, was to dry them out just enough so that, when spun quickly on the end of their string and released at the appropriate moment, they shot up and stuck to the ceiling.

The plan for the day had been to ride north a-ways before turning west to Roma in order to ride the road between Roma and Taroom which was said to be good. A study of the map over breakfast had revealed it to be a bit more of a ride than we had time for so we opted for a more direct route through Goondiwindi, Moonie, Condamine, Miles and Wandoan. That would still be more than 500 kms and nearly 6 hours in the saddle.

We headed back the way I’d travelled the day before, riding through Warialda before turning left to head slightly west towards Goondiwindi. All around was the carnage of massacred kangaroos and other creatures, a reminder of the folly of riding in this country any time between dusk and dawn. Later on the trip, one of our riding companions would tell of a mate who drove long-distance trucks across the middle of Australia and claimed to average around 50 ’roo hits a night.

It’s flat country out here, often sparsely vegetated where it’s been cleared for farming, or because it always was. You get a good understanding of what people mean when they talk about the ‘big sky’.

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These pictures give an idea of the road and the countryside between Warialda and Goondiwindi: flat, brown and roads that seldom curve. There’s not much challenge here for a rider.

We paused briefly in the deserted town of North Star. Unbelievably almost, at the same time as we dropped anchor at the public facilities a family travelling the other way had exactly the same need. Who’d have thought you’d have to queue for the loo out here?

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An example of fine contemporary architecture in the thriving metropolis of North Star.

By the time we passed through Bogabilla and joined the Newell Highway, the day was warming nicely and the wisdom of wearing mesh jackets from which layers could be reduced was becoming apparent. It starts cool out here, but the temperatures climb relentlessly to the low to mid 30s © during the day.

We stopped for fuel and coffee at Goondiwindi. In the service station, I spotted this wonderful Australian aid to farmers with tractors and other internal combustion engines that occasionally require encouragement to start.

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Somewhere before Bogabrilla I’d startled a flock of small birds, one of which, sadly, had connected terminally with the CB. After coffee I wondered over to inspect the bike and found I’d apparently also connected with a butterfly. Any enjoyment appears to have been one sided.

[url=http://postimage.org/]
If only I’d known about this kamikaze chap, I could have centred it!

As we drank our coffee and I ate an indifferent muffin, Pterodactyl told me there had been no real improvement in his headphones. He was very irritated as he’d recently replaced a damaged pair with which he’d travelled many a happy kilometre in relative silence. He was finding the occasional squeals very hard to put up with.

What can I say about the road north to Taroom? It’s wider and better quality than most of the road we’d travelled on in the morning, but it’s still flat and hot and straight.

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At Condamine we stopped for fuel—both for the bikes and ourselves. After 198.4 kms my bike drank 9.76 litres of 91 octane (regular fuel down under); Pterodactyl and I had a traditional Australian meat pie each.

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Post prandial preparations for the final haul to Taroom

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The road north from Condamine looks much like to road from the south into Condamine.

There was more scrub between Condamine and Taroom and it was hotter, but otherwise there not much change in riding conditions.

We arrived in Taroom at about the time we planned, found the Rumblers, said g’day and set up our tents.

The Rumblers
We’d come to Taroom to join the [url=http://www.rumblersanzacride.com/2016-ride]2016 Rumblers Anzac Ride, the fifth they’ve organised. While we’d realised they’d generally be pretty hard-core Harley and cruiser types, we’d also recognised that they were serious riders. The Anzac Rumble is the first of three rides which run together to take them all the way around this substantial continent. They do this regularly.

The Anzac ride is first in the series. The theme is riding Australia’s back roads and in the past, the ride has finished in a country town on Anzac Day, which I will explain in greater detail in the next part of this report. This year the ride was to start on Anzac Day. I use the terms ‘ride’ and ‘start’ a wee bit loosely as the Rumblers ride nowhere on Anzac Day. It’s given up to marking the day and doing their bit for the town.

While I’d seen that the Rumblers aim to raise money for prostate cancer research, I hadn’t twigged to the fact that a fair bit of preparatory work went into the ride to make sure someone in the town where they camped on Anzac Day got some benefit from it. I was surprised, and I think Pterodactyl was too, that we were greeted by the good burghers of Taroom with what is quaintly called down under a sausage sizzle. No one does that for a gang of scruffy looking leather-clad Harley riders.

A sausage sizzle’s what it says: blokes toss sausages and onion rings on a barbecue, women prepare coleslaw, someone buys loaves of the lowest possible quality bread, tomato sauce (ketchup) and the increasingly popular barbecue sauce. Each punter grabs a slice of bread and marches over to the barbecue where the chef slaps a sausage and some onion on it. Ferret, don’t panic, the onion is optional. Then you march to the salad table, add the sauce of your choice and some coleslaw, grab a beer and sit down somewhere and eat. It’s a simple and effective way to feed a good few people a meal which contains one or two of the essential elements of nutrition. Curiously, the Saturday morning sausage sizzle has become very popular outside hardware stores where seedy people take the edge off the damage done by the previous night on the grog, all the while contributing to some charity or another.

We were briefed about the following day and learned that the locals had organised a social event to entertain us the following afternoon.

A couple of beers to help get acquainted with our new best friends led to an early night. Anzac Day requires a correspondingly early start.

[Chapomis_imp]

Sounds great so far

[curlyjoe_imp]

Sorry to hear about Pterodactyl's rough go of it thus far.

Enjoy the trip and thanks for sharing the great pics and prose!

[redbirds_imp]

Wonderful report as usual George.

Those meat pies look scrumptious BTW, look like American pot pie.

[Cormanus]

redbirds, the meat pie is still OK by me, but they aren't quite as good as they once were. Back in the day they got churned out of the bakery daily and were kept in a pie heater—best described as a large stainless steel box with an element and four or five shallow warming drawers each holding lots of pies. Now days, they freeze them in a cellophane-like wrapper, whip them out and microwave them. It does that microwave thing of making them too moist (actually I mean slightly soggy) and makes them too danged hot as well.

Once when I was a lot younger and driving cabs for a living, I had to go to the pie factory at about 4.00 am to pick someone up. I went inside, breathed in through my nose and thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Fresh meat pies.

An old-fashioned pie warmer looked something like this.

[Tezza_imp]

You guys need to let me know when the next run is on as I would be keen to join you.

[Cormanus]

You guys need to let me know when the next run is on as I would be keen to join you.

Will do. PM sent meanwhile.