Time to Turn Back?

What are we doing.! As the sun was setting the temperature had dropped to 5 degrees. Is it too late to change our minds and head back to the warm..??

It now really feels like we are on our last leg of our trip as these are roads we have done often. From the Sunshine Coast we make a detour to the Gold Coast to catch up with Deb’s brother and his wife at his cafe in Ormeau, and then loop back to the New England highway to climb the mountains to the tablelands and head to Deb’s mums place for a couple of days in Inverell.

Like other highways the New England highway is also undergoing a significant amount of roadworks, with a number of the mountain passes receiving major works. Unfortunately it looks like we are losing some of the character of these passes that made them great on the bike. With all the roadworks on our way south it only seemed fitting that the ST clocked over 100,000km just as we hit another section of road works today.

In Warwick we had some time off the bike and found a bakery with a vanilla slice.

It was nice to have a vanilla slice where the custard actually has taste. But it was let down by the pastry which wasn’t very crisp. We scored it 7.

As we crossed back into New South Wales the temperature had started to drop so we swapped out our summer gloves for our mids. Within the next hour the temperature really started to fall and we had to dig to find the layers we discarded on our first day’s riding nearly three weeks ago.

And while we shivered our way from Glen Innes to Inverell we were rewarded by the last glimmers of light as we headed west into the final stages of the sunset with beautiful silhouettes of trees, and wind turbines in a background of orange.

Rolling into Inverell after dark is a world away from the warmth of north Queensland … to think we rode from dinner in Airlie Beach only days earlier in shorts and t-shirt. Here the wood fire is going.

Today’s Distance: 605km

Total Distance: 6,150km

And around Inverell