We arrived in Sydney on Fri 3rd Oct for a 3-month adventure. Our base is Austinmer, South Sydney where we have a house swap for the 3 months – but a big part of our trip will be cycling the Mawson Trail – a 900km cycling trail in the Flinders mountain range – starting in Blinman and ending in Adelaide. We flew from London to Sydney with bikes and gear…..which never makes for easy travelling ….
…..and got ourselves orientated into the time zone for 10 days before flying to Adelaide.
We have a cycling friend who had offered to meet us at the airport, put us up for a day in Adelaide before driving us to the start of the trail at Blinman, which was a great hassle free way to start our trip. The back story to that friendship is that we met Adrian while cycling across Australia in our world tour in 2019 – randomly on the road when we got chatting and ended up spending an evening together in a campsite along the way. We also spent a day just hanging out being tourists together in Melbourne when we got there. His contact details were “Adrian Adelaide” in Nigel’s phone and although we weren’t in regular contact with him since we got back to London, when Nigel said we were coming to cycle the Mawson Trail, Adrian offered to collect us at the airport, have us to start so we could sort our bikes out – and then drive the 6 hour trip to Blinman to get us to the start of the trail. We had always experienced amazing hospitality as cyclists in Australia – and this reminded us exactly of that…considering we didn’t even know Adrian’s full name!!
Arrived at Adelaide Airport to be met by a cheery Adrian who had borrowed a trailer for our bikes from a friend – and within 2 minutes it was as if we had only seen each other last week! Poor Adrian had already had a strenuous morning at the dump, as the friend who he had borrowed the trailer from had used the opportunity to fill it with garden waste and tree cuttings before giving it to him, which Adrian then had to dispose of…it would seem that Aussie friendliness obviously doesn’t start at home
Back to his place for lunch before bike set up, grocery shopping and all the last minute preparation – including a few trips back and forth to the bicycle shop to get a few issues in Nigel’s bike sorted
Dinner and drinks with his girlfriend Christy, who we had never met, but we had some very deep and meaningful conversation considering we’d only just met……
…..and a relatively early night in prep for the long drive to the start.
Wed 15th Oct – What we thought would be a functional trip to get us from A-B (Adelaide to Blinman) turned out to be a really fun road trip – where we laughed non stop for the 6 hours of travel, when apart from everyone trying to out-funny each other, Adrian also pointed out areas of interest for our return cycling trip. At one stage we got stuck behind an entire house being transported along the motorway …….
….with everyone groaning that it was going really to slow us down. But no…this house was travelling at 110km an hour, which was our comfortable speed to travel with a bike loaded trailer.
As we got nearer to Blinman we definitely got more remote – wild emus and kangaroos were freely roaming in some pretty barren terrain. We arrived in Blinman around 4:30pm. A town that really didn’t have much going on.
it was baking hot – and for some bizarre reason I was already well-eaten by mozzies with some nice red welts on my backside and arms! (The only one of us in the car to have anything bites!). Myself and Nigel had planned to camp but because Nigel hadn’t slept brilliantly the night before we opted to take a motel room so that we wouldn’t have to set up camp on a gravel pitch in baking temperatures, and could start the trip feeing well rested.
Big steak dinners, watching the sun go down…
….followed by some great star gazing before retiring for the night – a mix of nerves and excitement for what lay ahead!
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