Knees and Peas
I woke up that morning with one of my culled Australian atlas pages still lying on my chest. The air was a bit warmer in Bellingen in the mornings than it had been in the mountains, and I wanted to get an early start to hopefully make it to Grafton, about 80 miles east and north via Coffs Harbour on the coast.
As I set out for Coffs, where I'd intended a long lunch on the coast before the longer segment to Grafton, I felt an ache creep into the ligaments of my right knee. As the kilometers rolled by, the ache became a twang, and the twang didn't take long to become outright throbbing.
I pulled over to the side and surveyed the damage. My mileage the day before hadn't been too great, but there had still been a few rollers past Ebor before I'd hit the descent. No movement and the pain immediately subsided. I could walk around too, but back on the bike the ligaments were playing like guitar strings. Reeling in my mind how I'd been pedaling the past few days in combination with the mileage I'd done before the trip and I was pretty sure I'd run up against injury from a too-rapid increase in mileage. I decided to push through to Coffs Harbour and consider putting Grafton off a day. After all, the month was still young and I could afford to lay up a bit before I got to Queensland. There, when the distance between towns got longer, I'd have less chance to adjust my travel plans on the fly and hole up wherever I chose.
My spirits, ironically, were buoyed by humor around the fantastic tackiness that is Coffs Harbour. Intending to avoid the sort of resort-development-gone-bad that characterizes certain tourist towns worldwide (I'd heard Coffs Harbour would be no exception), I couldn't help but chuckle at a larger-than-life banana advertising an indoor ice-skating rink (by then the irony of voluntary experiencing more ice struck me as enormously funny), a giant windmill that advertised what had to be the tiniest motel on the entire highway, and row upon row of huge (artificial) orange trees apparently celebrating fabulous orchards that were probably knocked down some years ago to make room for... huge and artificial orange trees now in their place. It was all part of driving into the resort-mecca that is Coffs Harbour.
I called it a rest there. I checked into a youth hostel and, digging around my stash for vitamins I'd purchased the night before, wandered off to a grocery store for a bag of ice and ended up buying frozen peas. I used the peas to ice the knee, and with some daytime left to kill, wandered out to the beach (on two feet now rather than two wheels) and up on the pennisula overlooking the harbor. The view was good, the fish and chip shop at the base of the pennisula even better, and I killed an afternoon eating slow, rotating peas around, and being bemused by the idea of heading to a city another 1,300 miles north after having difficulties pulling off a problem-free 250.
I chased a quick advil with a beer cadged from a bottle shop on the way back to the hostel, took care of laundry and some sundry to-do's, and headed off to bed in the hopes that tomorrow would see better luck and some fresh miles.
As I set out for Coffs, where I'd intended a long lunch on the coast before the longer segment to Grafton, I felt an ache creep into the ligaments of my right knee. As the kilometers rolled by, the ache became a twang, and the twang didn't take long to become outright throbbing.
I pulled over to the side and surveyed the damage. My mileage the day before hadn't been too great, but there had still been a few rollers past Ebor before I'd hit the descent. No movement and the pain immediately subsided. I could walk around too, but back on the bike the ligaments were playing like guitar strings. Reeling in my mind how I'd been pedaling the past few days in combination with the mileage I'd done before the trip and I was pretty sure I'd run up against injury from a too-rapid increase in mileage. I decided to push through to Coffs Harbour and consider putting Grafton off a day. After all, the month was still young and I could afford to lay up a bit before I got to Queensland. There, when the distance between towns got longer, I'd have less chance to adjust my travel plans on the fly and hole up wherever I chose.
My spirits, ironically, were buoyed by humor around the fantastic tackiness that is Coffs Harbour. Intending to avoid the sort of resort-development-gone-bad that characterizes certain tourist towns worldwide (I'd heard Coffs Harbour would be no exception), I couldn't help but chuckle at a larger-than-life banana advertising an indoor ice-skating rink (by then the irony of voluntary experiencing more ice struck me as enormously funny), a giant windmill that advertised what had to be the tiniest motel on the entire highway, and row upon row of huge (artificial) orange trees apparently celebrating fabulous orchards that were probably knocked down some years ago to make room for... huge and artificial orange trees now in their place. It was all part of driving into the resort-mecca that is Coffs Harbour.
I called it a rest there. I checked into a youth hostel and, digging around my stash for vitamins I'd purchased the night before, wandered off to a grocery store for a bag of ice and ended up buying frozen peas. I used the peas to ice the knee, and with some daytime left to kill, wandered out to the beach (on two feet now rather than two wheels) and up on the pennisula overlooking the harbor. The view was good, the fish and chip shop at the base of the pennisula even better, and I killed an afternoon eating slow, rotating peas around, and being bemused by the idea of heading to a city another 1,300 miles north after having difficulties pulling off a problem-free 250.
I chased a quick advil with a beer cadged from a bottle shop on the way back to the hostel, took care of laundry and some sundry to-do's, and headed off to bed in the hopes that tomorrow would see better luck and some fresh miles.
posted by eric at
7:34 AM
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