Gympy and Gympie

My plan to leave Brisbane Monday got unfortunately, as they say, "stuffed." Riding out of town through the Botanic Gardens on a crisp morning (Queensland or no, I was glad to have that fleece), I got to the suburb of Ashland Grove. Brisbane, beautiful and extremely liveable city that it is, still has miles and miles of Pizza Hut/KFC/used car lot/strip mall sprawl as any big city does, and I'd gone about 10 miles through it when BAM! what had to date been an inconvenience in my knee suddenly became a real and most unwelcome pain. I felt like someone was trying to take a screwdriver and pry loose my kneecap.

I hobbled to the side of the road, stretched, limped some more, and generally did an excellent job of looking like a gimp-cyclist in front of several dozen passing cars. I hung around a road-sign-come-stretching-tool for perhaps fifteen minutes before mounting the bike again.The trouble was still. A jolly voice in my head said, "Yeah, you're gonna have to fix that." I was.

I pulled into a bakery, the closest to a convenient chair I could find, and sat down to think up some options. Caloundra, the day's target, was around 70 miles away. I had the option of returning to Brisbane, which I didn't like, but returning would give me a shot at finding a respectable bike shop able to check my positioning, which I had started to believe might be causing the trouble since my couple of trips to the gym so far hadn't been having the desired effect. It was looking like Brisbane was the better idea.

As luck would have it, I found a surprisingly excellent bike shop called Lifecycle on my tentative ride back into the city. Blair, the proprietor, was able to set me up almost right away and comment on my position, making changes here and there all the while answering questions with the succint yet thorough answers of a real professional. Blair's changes didn't provided immediately relief, but it certainly gave me hope for the following day. And after an update (of course, I was in a bike shop after all) on the progress of the Tour, I set out on the road again in considerably better spirits.

The session with Blair had taken almost two hours, and there was little left to do but amble "home" and set up again in the hostel for the night (in a bit 0f true Australian generosity, Blair just smiled and charged me only $20 for the entire fitting when I offered him double that). I stopped at another bakery, this time with hunger as a motivator, and brought out one of the pages of my atlas to look over. A fit-looking guy in his 60s came over and said hello.

It turned out his name was Tom, who was a cyclist himself. While we chatted about trips we'd done and races we'd lost, Tom informed me that I'd probably just gone to the most professional bike shop in all of Brisbane and spent two hours with its top bike fitter, a guy who'd been doing fittings for over 20 years. I was thrilled to hear it, now even more confident that I wouldn't be trading one injury for another in the next few days.

Tom insisted on leading me back to his house to call up some maps he had of the northern suburbs of Brisbane. Having spent almost as much time looking at my atlas (meager on suburban detail) as I had cycling during my brief 10 miles of out and back from the city, I was only too happy for a dose of local knowledge. I followed Tom back and figured out a way out of the maze of Brisbane suburbs that would be on good road with good shoulder. Now I was really psyched.

I waved goodbye to Tom, and since it was now mid-afternoon, I parked the bike at the hostel and tooled around Brisbane. I walked through downtown, had a pizza slice from a local takeaway place (a slice , I was still filling a quota that hadn't been met in NZ) and spent the better part of the evening at the hostel's bar, swapping stories with the likes of other travelers and looking forward to the day ahead.

The next day was clear and sunny, and I made excellent time out of Brisbane, thanks to Tom's directions. I ventured through the Glass House Mountains, a scenic stretch of road that passes by a series of monument-like rocks that rise up out of the otherwise flat forestland east of the Great Dividing Range, and rolled into Caroumba just after midday.

By this point the knee had seemed to improve a bit. There were some sections it flared but 80 miles that day had gone by more or less okay. I was feeling good.

There isn't much to Coroumba, and the next day I didn't hang around long. I was keen to make up time where I had lost it in Surfer's and Brisbane, and wanted to get to Noosa, a spot the sounds of which reminded me even before I got there of Byron Bay. Noosa is another piece of Australia that has been keen to reject franchise businesses and over-ambitious resort developments. When I got there, it was just what I'd hoped - small funky shops, cafes serving cappucino with just that little bit of chocolate on top, passers-by who looked cheerful, many of whom on bicycles themselves. I liked it.

I liked it very much.

I had a cappucino.

Then I had a sandwich.

Okay, two sandwiches.

Filled up, I got a move on. Tempting as it was to stay in Noosa I had time to make up and it felt like a sin to leave leftover daylight when the sun had been setting consistently eac h day at 5. I was already looking at taking a bus through a substantial section of the Capricorn coast to make up lost time, and didn't feel like losing any more daylight than I had to.

I took out my iPod and played it while I rode up Noosa's pain-and-pleasure hill, named by its local triathletes who host a weeklong festival culminating in a race here each spring. Still dodging the Bruce Highway (formerly the Pacific Highway, but now that I was north of Brisbane it had changed names), I rode backroads the rest of the way to Gympie, and at the night-owl hour of 8:30, am already getting ready to crash.