I’ve just heard from Johnny Wuhu who (don’t you love it!) has finally landed in China.  We were wondering if he could blog out of China but seems all is well.

Check out his first post HERE which I’m sure you will find very interesting.

We’ve had one of the wettest winters in a few years which has tended to stymie our biking, but earlier in the week, we had a ride along the Rail Trail into Geelong and around the Barwon River.

Well, that was the plan………………….

In 1952, the water was touching just under the road of the 2nd bridge in the distance so this was no monster flood.

Of course, when a certain moron thinks the water in picture 1 is shallow enough to plow through, then this is the consequence.

We’ve never owned a car that hasn’t been grasping for the oily rag around 500k’s and then you’re desperately looking for a petrol station.

Well not with the Ford Mondeo Diesel.  Could get to Sydney on one tank full.

I’ve been a bit slack with my blogging of late but the truth is I seem to be running out of steam.  Maybe it’s the winter blues or whatever.

We’ve been doing a lot of bike riding and we make the most of any good weather to get out and flog the legs.  Call me a fair weather cyclist if you like, but at my age, comfort zone is my middle name.  We had three great days this week, and while MP was away, I snuck in some extra training.

The stars weren’t lined up too well yesterday as I managed a 9.5 dive off the beast coming into one of the road crossing chicanes along the Rail Trail.  The front wheel hit a piece of wood edging and headed left as the back wheel wanted to go right.  For an instant, I had similar thoughts as Jens Voigt as his tyre blew out at 70 kph in last year’s Tour De France, “Oops, this is going to hurt”. (The crash is at 53 seconds and he ended up seriously injured)

I’m not capable of those insane speeds anyway, but nevertheless, I landed on my arse big time and one of the cons of clip-on bike pedals is that the bike stays attached as you head south.  The bum and hip are awfully sore today and just picking up the soap in the shower is painful.  Could be worse. 

Actually, it was, because I arrived back in Drysdale and the coffee man had just packed up so the headache only got worse.

Aka Dogbait Junior, is off to China in a few weeks in an attempt to instil the Queen’s English into students in the city of Wuhu about 300k’s west of Shanghai.  Hopefully his graduates won’t end up on this blog!

I visited him this week at his hideaway in Apollo Bay about 2 hours west of OG where I helped him setup a blog so that he can chronicle his exploits to family and friends over the next year or so.  His literary skills are far better than mine and I would recommend his missives to all and I’m sure we will be entertained with his usual wit and humour.

His blog is still in development stage but I’m sure my efforts won’t be in vain.  Stick him on your reading list and give him some encouragement.

Goodness gracious, how could this happen?  A woman Prime Minister in Oz!  Heaven help us, why isn’t she at home looking after the hubby and the kids?

Probably because she doesn’t have either and how can you take seriously as PM a barren spinster who mashes her vowels with a sledgehammer.  No way I’ll be voting for her.

Well that’s the thinking of some people and a similar conversation overheard in the local supermarket by one of MP’s fitness class partners.

A woman reins supreme in Oz for the first time in our history and we could say about time too considering Oz was one of the first countries in the world to give women the vote.

Good one, Julia Gillard.

About an hour to go until a leadership ballot but it looks like we will have our first female Prime Minister.

What do they say about a day in politics?

A few weeks ago, we went to Melbourne to buy our new Loewe TV from Carlton Audio and Visual in Lygon St, Carlton.  This street happens to be the Little Italy of the City with restaurants and cafes galore, so if you have the moola, you’ll never starve.

After the wheeling and dealing buying the TV, we headed up the street looking for a water trough and somewhere to replenish the nosebag.  We’d only gone 20 metres when we were spruiked upon with the promise of great pizza and a couple of free drinks, so with rumbling tummy’s, we were easy prey.  The place was called Via Veneto, and true to their promise, they made great pizza at a very reasonable price.

I have no issue with spruikers drumming up business as we’ve seen it a lot in our travels and it adds a little colour to the travel experience.  However, it irritates a lot of people and the restaurant owners have met and decided to have a voluntary cease fire which lasted all of 49 minutes.

Check out the article in today’s paper and methinks the Council will unleash the Grey Ghosts anyday now.

Two rare things happened this week.  Firstly, we went to the football, the first time in 14 years for moi and 38 years since MP had seen a game.

The other rare event was that we were invited to do something social and our thanks go to our good friend, Tanya, who is a Geelong Football Club member and we were offered her parents tickets who are overseas at the moment.

The Geelong Cats won premierships in 2007 and 2009 and the are currently on top of the ladder and playing great football.  They played Melbourne who are in the middle of the field and we expected to trounce them but it turned out to be a lacklustre game and the Cats did just enough to win easily.  They probably eased off the pedal after the hard game against the second side last week.

Anyway, it was a most enjoyable day and MP got to learn a few things that she didn’t know before including how far these guys can kick a bag of wind and that the light flashing on top of the grandstand after each goal is to tell the umpires when the TV adverts have finished.

           The umpies and escorts             The mighty Cats on the field

          Steve Johnson lines up for goal                 The final score

I started dabbling with computer about 25 years ago and I keep forgetting how far we have come in that time. This is an ad I found somewhere pricing a 10Mb hard drive (HD) at $3398, so based on the 1 Terabyte drive I bought recently for $80, the capacity is 100,000 times bigger.  If you could actually buy a 1Tb HD in those days it would have been worth $339,800,000. 

Back in the late 80’s, I purchased an IBM PS/2 70 for my company and it had a HUGE 60Mb hard drive and we paid $70,000 for the computer. 

Wouldn’t you love to be able to go back in time with a crate of hards drives and flog them off.  A good way to bring on early retirement.

Not so many years ago, I stuck this ad up on my pin board and drooled over the ultimate computer I wanted.  Goodness, it, and the PS/2, wouldn’t even make decent boat anchors these days.

Whenever I start babbling on about the “good old days”, someone please give me a whack over the head. 

A boat anchor should do the job nicely.

We dropped the car off for a service at the Ford dealer in Geelong today which is right on the Barwon River and killed some time by walking the full 20k of the river track.

Took us 3 hours 45 minutes and arrived back just as the car was ready.  Some more photos of this beautiful area.  Check out the pigeon perch on the bridge.  During the massive floods of 1952, the water rose to nearly road level so they would have had to find some other place to hang out. The Ford dealer is just behind those cars between the two bridges.

My regular readers would understand my need for good coffee and I’ve babbled on the subject in the past.  Not the black swill North Americans pretend is coffee but my poison is the European style coffee made with milk and steamed to perfection with good, freshly ground coffee beans.  I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea (excuse the pun) but bear with me.

It takes class to be a quality barista and there is no shortage of good coffee houses in this country and you soon take note of the good ones.  Oddly, some of the best coffee I have sampled has come from a local shop, a servo on a country highway somewhere or the local donut shop.  In fact, on my trip to Warrnambool last week, I broke the journey with a coffee stop at a small supermarket and later at a petrol station with a small restaurant and both dished up an excellent brew. Our local Donut King also does a mean latte and Seniors get two hot donuts thrown in for free.  Probably a government conspiracy to harden our arteries quicker and get us off the social security bandwagon.

The biggest surprise coffee wise came yesterday on our long bike ride.  One of our trips is a 62k ride from Queenscliff to Geelong and return along the Bellarine Rail Trail.  We go through the small townships of Drysdale and Leopold but it’s off the beaten track if you want a caffeine fix so you don’t bother.  We get to the small Drysdale Railway station which is used by the old steam train for tourist trip from Queenscliff and Drysdale and a guy had set up a coffee van and so we screeched to a halt and rubbed our eyes in case it was just a mirage.

Being a discerning connoisseur, it takes a lot to say this but it was the best cup of latte I have ever tasted.  MP likes her coffee a bit weaker and got a cup she said was up there with the best.

The guy is battling the Council to stay there permanetly so we signed his petition and we said if he succeeds, we’ll make him a rich man.  Along with all the mothers who meet at the park with their kids and frequent his van too.

Incidently, McCafe doesn’t do a bad job either and Tim Horten’s in Canada doesn’t do a latte per se but their vanilla killers are to die for. 

There goes that pun again.

Our Super Tuesday bike count went off without a hitch.  Well you could hardly have a hitch when I only had to count 16 and MP had 7. 

I was on a well established bike track on the Barwon River in Geelong and the 7am to 9am count was geared towards commuter riders but it took 30 minutes to get my first customer.  This was my second customer.  It was 9:02am and I was packing up and along came 7 more bikes so I suspect a count from 9am onwards would have gathered far more recreational cyclists.

I would have loved to have seen the guy at work on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets in the Melbourne CBD.  1795 riders in two hours!   His counting sheet would caught fire!  I presume they would have had to have four counters for an intersection like that.  A bike track similar to mine along the Yarra river in Melbourne scored 1407 cyclists and here was MP and I sending one another bored text messages.

Anyway, hopefully a useful exercise and we scored a nice tee shirt and we ploughed our $100 back into the bicycle network.

February is usually the month from Hell weather wise but has been very mild and we’ve only had three days around 35c where you would have expected a few 40’s by now.  Somewhat of a change from the Armageddon of last February.

This has helped us get out with the bikes more often and we’ve really got the bug back again after the last few weeks of enjoyable riding.  I was reading where bone domes can deteriorate over the years, and since we’ve had ours for 12 years, we lashed out on new helmets, and golly gosh, have they improved in design.  Dials at the back so you can tighten or loosen to size and far more comfortable than the oldies. 

Our seats are originals and not that comfortable but we use gel seat covers and padded cycling shorts which help one’s numb bum and other vitals.  We lashed out on new, quality seats and I forgot to use my gel seat cover and shorts over the the 50k (sorry, 49.9k) bike ride the other day and had no saddle soreness whatsoever.  Now we have purchased clip-on bike shoes and pedals and yet to try them out but people swear by their efficiency so they will get a testing shortly.

We’re members of Bicycle Victoria and have signed up to be counters in Super Tuesday next Tuesday 2 March.  This is being conducted over most of Oz where volunteers are being used to count bike usage to assist BV and Councils with the data necessary for planning and allocation of resources.  We are allocated locations to count bikes over two hours from 7am till 9am and Geelong was included this year for the first time. 

When we logged on to check locations, we noticed two locations in Ocean Grove and one was available so MP grabbed it.  Her location is the path between OG and Barwon Heads along the Spit which seems unusual but we were told it was specifically requested by the Geelong Council.  I suspect MP is not going to be too stressed with this location and the betting is whether she actually gets anyone to count.  I have a great position along the Barwon River in Geelong where two tracks merge just a couple of hundred metres from that photo in my last blog post.

All the counting points are either four or three way intersections and we both have three way ones where you have to count bikes in and out of the intersection.  Each road is given a number so a bike may go from 1 to 3 and you tick off that one on your sheet.  I feel like Bitzer with his clipboard in Shaun the Sheep!

Now what I want to do is arrange for a big group of cyclists to ride along to MP’s spot and all diverge in different directions at the same time and that should make her head spin.

Anyhow, it’s an easy way to earn a nice tee shirt and 50 bucks each to one’s favourite organisation.

So what were we up to today?  Anyone with an eagle eye could tell me the the country pedigree of my mountain bike, or even better, the brand name.  Certainly one of my regular readers from the northern climes shouldn’t have any problem.

Contrary to my recent rants about my Catholic education, I did have a couple of good teachers and one Brother in particular taught me to really appreciate geography, maths and English.  My love of travel originated from my appreciation of geography and another interest was studying the weather.  The weather dictates our lives and knowing whether your tootsies will get wet or you might get sunburnt on Wednesday is important.

Our nearest Meteorological Weather Station is 18k away at Geelong airport and I have always relied on that for my daily weather fix.  I was going to buy a Davis Vantage Pro weather station to hook up to my computer so that I would have more accurate information.  You can then register your weather station with Weather Underground and there are thousands of unofficial but very accurate weather stations around the world.  This link overlays all the weather stations on Google maps and you may need to pan in to see the temperature appear to show you a station.  If you click on the temperature it will take you to the full statistics page for that weather station and you can modify the map settings and set the page to the nearest weather station in your area. Hence, I have a weather station setup for all my regular readers and it’s nice knowing they are freezing their butts off while I’m out having a swim.

Lo and behold, the Ocean Grove Fire Brigade recently setup a Vantage Pro on the top of the fire station which is only 2k away and has been recording since mid January. Hence, I’ll be using that one, and on the right sidebar of this blog you will see the weather stats link for OG and you can click on that for the full history details.  Below that are three links and one is for the beach web cam so it’s most important knowing if one can run along the beach at low tide or whether it’s worth taking the boogie board for the swim afterwards.

Now we just need someone to clean those windows.