Perth

So first thing up, I spent a week working in Perth. More precisely, I spent Day One on a plane and in airports, Days 2 and 3 working, Days 4 and 5 gadding about sightseeing, Days 6 and 7 working even harder, and Day 8 on another plane.

For reasons of lack of availability of suitably qualified persons, our Scholarships Section sent anyone that was ever remotely connected to them – ie the project development, including me – out to train their clients how to use their spiffy new management system. This would be fine, except for the inconvenient smidgin of prior familiarity with their work that is implied in said education process. Fortunately, the new software in question is so extraordinarily spiffy that it was possible, with a minimum of reading ahead and cribbing from the user manual, for me to bluff a reasonably sound understanding of the job that these users do every working day. At least, if they saw straight through my outright false assumption of experience, they were polite enough not to point any such shortcomings out.

So the training went fine, which left evenings and the weekend to gad about Perth with Fi being entertained mightily by Jill and the coincidental commencement of a week-long festival of the arts. So we went yachting (although I missed that due to, you know, work) and attended the opera and bought wine and laughed at Rose Hancock’s house (which I understand is now to be demolished, hopefully to be replaced by an eyesore of even more spectacular proportions) and sampled a number of locally-brewed beers.

When in Perth, if I may make a suggestion, try the locally-brewed beers. They’re an isolated, lonely lot over there in the west, and they have a lot of time to themselves to perfect the art of brewing, is my guess.

Up North

As soon as I wearily lumbered off the plane back from WA, I had to pack saddle bags, gear sacks and backpacks in preparation for our motorbike trip up to the Gold Coast. Fiona’s bike club was having its annual general meeting, and as the ACT chapter were due this year to relinquish the much-loathed National Captaincy (whose administration had effectively put a bullet in the head of goodwill and camaraderie in the club over the past couple of years), Fi was keen to go and make sure it never came back. She may have had some formal position to hand over as well (Membership Officer?) but as that was one of the aforementioned sore points, I think our real motivation for this trip was purely related to zooming up the highways.

To more effectively achieve zoom status, she bought a new bike, which arrived about five days before our departure (while she was still in Perth with me). She demonstrated fearless anti-bureaucratic determination to get the thing registered and fitted out in two working days. The same process would have taken me weeks, and probably have necessitated two or three days off work. However she was highly motivated i.e. zoom! We hit the road with kath and Hector early on the Thursday morning, and almost the first thing I spotted about her new sleek new Raptor is faster, lighter and cooler-looking than her trudging workhorse Zephyr. Guess which one I was riding?

As it turns out, highway travel is (a) often quite dull and (b) incredibly painful after a while. Despite frequent breaks and several detours to take more scenic/less straight roads, it was pretty ordinary travelling. Especially when it rained on us.We stayed overnight in a van park in Port Macquarie that was so full of trailer trash we thought we must be on a schlock movie set. Yikes.

Anyway, we made it eventually (after two long painful days) to Main Beach on the Gold Coast, where we hardly got lost at all, and as we were trundling about some back streets looking in the wrong place for the hotel - not my fault, the address as written was actually wrong – Fiona’s bike conked out. Overheated we thought, though the culprit would actually turn out to be the battery. We ended up having to push it the last couple of hundred metres, which is a pretty ignominious way to turn up to a bike rally. Fortunately everyone else was in the pool and didn’t notice.

I don’t have much to say about the Gold Coast. Fi’s sister Jacqui met us there and she and Hector and I did some window shopping while they had their meeting. There are a hell of a lot of people on Gold Coast beaches of a Saturday morning in late summer, is all I’m saying.

After the formalities were over, Jacs and Fi and I headed up to Noosa for a couple of days rest before the long ride home. We stayed at the South Pacific Resort, in which we spent a few days on our honeymoon. It’s a rather languid arrangement of cane furniture, palm trees, pools and tropical ease. Plus you could get margaritas brought to your room, if you wanted (we didn’t but if ever there was a hotel service that you would want on standby, it’s that one).

The Raptor rather undermined its own stellar performance by finally conking out completely several times on the way home, starting with the morning of our departure from Noosa. Dave goes ahead to check out, waits ten minutes, wonders why his wife has not joined him, heads back to apartment carpark to see wife fuming and stressed. Dave wisely goes to make arrangements for jumper leads (which are surprisingly effective).

Hoping that we just did something careless like leave on a light that drained the battery, we set off and rode all day, collapsing pretty much spent when we made it to Coffs Harbour. Next morning – nothing. Battery well and truly dead and gone. Happily, there was a Battery World more or less straight across the freeway. All we had to do was push the bike across five lanes of traffic, unpack everything and remove the best-protected battery in the world and install a new one, in a plantless concrete carpark with temperatures in the high thirties. That was our first hour. Happily, ripping the damn bike’s cold, still heart out and replacing it with a fresh ticker gushing with vital juices did seem to do the trick.

We planned to spend that night in the Hunter Valley, perhaps sampling some of the local wine and in any case having a jolly relaxing affair of it. Unfortunately, we rather overlooked our distinct lack of regional knowledge, and managed to miss any signs that may have indicated a need to turn off the freeway (somewhere around Newcastle). By the time we discovered our error, we had overshot by about an hour. Bugger that, we thought, and just headed for home, a mere four extra hours away.

Ow. Big mistake. Ow. Kids, don’t do what Donny Don’t does. Nine hours on a bike in a day is hell on your throttle wrist and your sitting arse. Just don’t even think about it.

And then…

We went back to work the following Monday. That was the night my grandfather, who has been ill for several years and was not expected to last to last Christmas, dies in his sleep. But I think I’ve blogged enough for one afternoon, so I’ll try and talk about how I felt about that tomorrow.

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