Arrival in Sydney

After 10 months in Wellington the bags are packed (all 1.5 of them), and the bike is boxed. The day began with Meredith offering a ride to the Wellington airport at a crisp 4:30am. Surprisingly, we were both wide awake. World Cup fever, in spite of the fact that every live game is aired at or around 4am, has spread faster than autumn flu around here . And with the Tour de France (George Hincapie! Allez Allez!) and Wimbledon, European sport just had to assume that the South Pacific will watch anyway, and it does. To give a sense of how seriously the World Cup is taken in NZ just about every man woman and child (perhaps a couple dogs too) in the Wellington airport were clustered around the single TV in Wellington airport this morning. A massive 27 incher. And anyone who wasn't physically going through security had heads turned. I managed to finangle my way out of the crowd and through the comparatively uncrowded security check, getting to Sydney later that morning.

Sydney is the first stop in preparation for a trip that'll take the better part of the next four weeks. I have wanted for some time to do a truly long ride. Not the kind of ride that means going nonstop for 400 miles and slumping over the handlebars like one of the exhausted souls from Triplets of Bellvue (exciting once, but think about it), but a point-to-point ride. A ride over several days, or even several weeks.

The trip will, dependent upon road conditions, wildlife crossings, punctures, detours to bike shops to watch the Tour (I am a rabid fan), spoke detachments, the occasional surf break, stops to clear bulldust from the sunglasses, and number of cars dodged... meander its way between Tamworth and Cairns along the Australian coastline and interior.

Tamworth is the start, and lies north of Sydney, west of the Great Dividing Range. I decided to start in Tamworth, incidentally the "country music capital of Australia," because it will avoid riding through the miles and miles of Sydney metropolitan exterior (a maze of car lots and shopping malls). I also wanted the trip to start west, in this case west of the Great Dividing Range, to mean that the first couple days I'll be riding up and over Australia's mountains through a long breadth of national parkland towards the coast. From there the route picks up alternating back roads and highway following the Queensland coastline en route to Cairns.

For the trip I am packing light. A daypack and a handlebar bag will carry about everything I will use in four weeks on the road. They say that when packing for a cycling trip one should take all the gear that one needs and then separate out half. For me, that half is:
1 change street clothing
1 towel
1 pair street shoes
1 thermal top
1 pair leg warmers
2 pair socks
2 spare tubes
1 pump
1 multitool
1 spoke wrench
2 spare spokes
1 iPod
1 camera
1 IT band massage stick
2 water bottles
5 pages ripped from an Australian atlas purchased in Wellington
1 Kryptonite u-lock to keep dingos from stealing my ride

And a bicycle. Mine is a 2005 Specialized Tarmac, a skinny thing begging in style for the hot green and pink handlebar bag I borrowed from Paul, my friend in Wellington, to outfit it with. Last week was the first test of the loaded gear, the loaded bike, and my wish-they-were-better-loaded legs. My bicycle weighs about 16 pounds. The gear, 17. Me... 180. Thankfully, on the last ride the gear and the bike never said a word about it. And I certainly didn't bring it up.

The bike is still in its box shipped over from Sydney. The gear is piled in characteristic should-be-organized fashion on the bunk that is mine at Oz Backpackers on Cougee Beach. With a day left in Sydney and another day on the train to Tamworth, the real ride, onward to Cairns, gets underway in two days.