Byron at Last

Leaving Lawrence the knee still felt a little rough, and a section of the road back to Whipporie (driven over the night prior) was dirt anyway, so I walked a couple of the kilometers between. It was slow going back up to Whipporie, but by the time I got there it was lunchtime so I could, this time, take the station owner up on his ham on white advertised on the chalkboard outside the door. I did.

I passed through Casino (which has no casino, incidentally, making it an even sleepier town than my next stop, Lismore) netting about 60 miles that day. Lismore was only about 30 miles from Byron Bay, which I planned to ride early the following morning and make it into Byron in time to spend the day there where I planned to get off the bike for a bit, and maybe even get wet in the surf. Or in a generous interpretation, cross train.

I rolled out of Lismore at 7:30, getting into Byron just after 9:00am with plenty of daylight. Byron was (and is) a vast change from the hinterland. This was suddenly proper Australian coast. Backpackers spewed forth from buses running the circuit from Brisbane to Sydney. Tie-dye t-shirt shops and fruit smoothie outfits decorated main street. There was traffic. There was actually a selection of hostels and internet cafes. Roads are designed to lead to Byron, as opposed to towns growing up around the road that's there. I was in a proper city again. There was a bookshop. A local cinema. I felt like I'd just stepped off a plane.

With the afternoon in Byron and the temperature at a pleasant 75 F, I wandered around a bit and found a surf shop willing to rent boards and give surf lessons for an extra fee. Having done a miserable job at surfing once before, I took the board and the lesson together, finding my trainee group included a fresh-off-the-boat Irishman, a family with a brother and sister, and a 10-year old girl who was being looked after by the surf school instructor.

The 10-year old wasted no time in abusing the egos of all (particularly the men) in the group by standing, walking end-to-end, switching up feet mid-air, and generally doing tricks on her board while the rest of us struggled to keep balance in the 3 foot swells. Afterwards I decided to work out kinks in the body with a yoga session (Byron, very possibly, has more yoga studios per city block than any other city, it's that kind of town). and after some very cathartic stretching wandered back to the hostel, showered, dug out the atlas, and figured out the next day's travel.