A day pottering

It was a really excellent day today, a bit of pottering followed by a good ride on gravel roads.

The place where we are camping is such a cool place that its a shame not to spend time here. I wandered along the beach first thing and had the place to myself apart from some ever present wildlife on the foreshore of the estuary. 

So rather than dash out, we spent several hours tweaking the bikes - oil changes on all of them, a bit of electrical tidying up, I adjusted my clutch, all things that need a bit of attention now and again.

And nerdy as it seems,we have now worked out a way to charge or macs as we ride. The the difficulty was how to secure the macbook and the charge lead, given that its magnetic and flips out at the slightest bump. But by putting into a double zipped hard case, and close it round the connector bit, it holds it in place and allows it to charge. Hooray. What with the cameras and phones already able to charge from USB ports, we’re sorted.

By about 2.30pm, we were ready to go out. We needed food for the evening and tomorrow but it was quite late and the nearest sizable town was a 60km ride by sealed road. Or 21kms over gravel, a no brainer really. 

That’s how we ended up riding up and over the Asbestos Range  (yes, a former  source of that now not very popular stuff) and down into York Town, one of the first ever British settler towns in Tasmania, and to nearby Beaconsfield, a mining town where there was a mining mishap a while back.

The road was fabulous, and after my silly tumble a week ago, it took me a while to get comfortable with the deep gravel along it. It was actually quite a good road as far as unsealed roads go, but the descent into York Town was a bit dodgy and very long. These bikes dont have great brakes anyway, but riding down a steep hill over several centimetres of gravel withe the weight of the bike pushing you faster ( yep, even silly little postie bikes have some weight which adds to the problem of keeping it upright on dodgy surfaces)

But we all survived, and met the sealed road at YorkTown, a former convict outpost and one of the earliest British settlements in Australia, the first permanent settlement in Northern Tasmania. No buildings survive, and it was abandoned not long after it sprung up because it was a difficult to access by river, the river being quite silty with a wide foreshore, and after rain ( of which there is plenty in Tasmania) it got very swampy. However, good timber and plenty of water seems to have been why the place grew up here initially.  

But by all accounts it was a pretty rough place, many convicts once they’d done their time, settling here. But of course, with no infrastructure and acceptance of no rules and regulations, many of them just went back to their thieving ways. Only they didn’t get transported back to Britain or anywhere else if they got caught; they were executed. Job done. 

But according to the picture, there was a McDonalds here, although it may have been an early collaboration with Pizza Hut.( top left of photo)

Beaconsfield is just down the road, a former gold mining town on the Tamar River. Gold was only discovered by accident, whilst they were digging for limestone, and the place was known as Brandy Creek originally. It was renamed after Benjamin Disraeli, first earl of Beaconsfield and UK prime minister at the time. 

There was a mining incident in 2006 where 17 men were trapped underground.One died, 14 escaped and two were trapped but rescued two weeks later, having been trapped nearly 1 km beneath the surface. Scary.

We needed some groceries so went into IGA. but we kept forgetting things, so went back three times in the space of about two hours and by the third time, we were almost like family to the checkout lady.

We also had the worst cup of coffee ever in the town; it was almost undrinkable but as we had nothing else, it had to do. But as we were getting back onto the bikes, we saw the coffee lady tipping about 4 gallons of the stuff down the drain. She looked a bit sheepish when she saw us, but hopefully it did more for her drains than it did for us. Nasty.

Te gravel road was the way we took home too, and we stopped en route to pick up brush wood for the planned campfire. 

Picking wood up in National Parks is frowned upon as its part of the place, habitat that they are trying to preserve. But rubbish fallen wood from elsewhere is ok, and it went on the bikes, although we looked like motorised hedges as we rode along.

But before we lit the fire, we wandered along the beach as the sun was setting. Very peaceful, and very beautiful sunsets as the light dropped below the hills and the reflections on the water changed hue as the temperature dropped.

Whilst we were eating round the fire, last night’s possum came back. This is clearly his patch, and he stayed with us for ages, walking right up to the table, trying to get into bags, and climbing the tree adjacent to the table. 

Then some poteroos turned up and there was a bit of a face off between them and the possum, but it all ended happily.