The Snowy Mountains Ride

This photo was taken at the bottom of the hill right at the 'Tumut Pond Dam' wall. My favourite road so far!
What a perfect ride!
I cannot stop smiling when I think of it. 1800 km in three days... marvellous scenery...great company...and once again: I've fed my soul! Hmmmm... what a weekend!

Friday morning. The alarm was set to go off at 5:30am and I woke at 6:30. Needless to say that the panic was most overwhelming, as I had not packed anything other than my camera and the tinted visor. The meet was at 7 for a 7:30 departure and I had a 35 minute ride ahead of me to get there. Aaaaarrrrrrrgh!

They waited...

Joey was scolding me for being late and then laughed. Nobody mentioned it again. It was only the four of us, plus Fezz on his new bike at Albion Park. He then left us at Tathra after a fine lunch at the Hotel.
Getting to Tathra is once again a fine set of twisties, Turning left off the Pacific Hwy at Tilba Tilba and just before Horseshoe Bay take a right out of Bermagui. Another 40 something k's of 70s and 45s and on top of the hill is the Tathra Hotel.

Did you know that you can see a blue whale right around lunchtime down there?

It's a hydraulic one, with the very cute addition of an upside down shower head, sprinkling water...almost like the real thing...

Great for kidding the kids...small ones and gullible big ones.

Somehow it was a little difficult to really relax at the pub, as there was so much more road to get conquered.

We were soon met by Kane ZX9R and his mate Phil on his Yama-harley at a Bega petrol station. We did stop over there once before on the Phillip Island tour and the lady at the counter recognised us. However, we had a little unscheduled stopover there when Skipp's chain and sprockets started to play up.

Nothing a large shifter can't fix...

Unfortunately that was far from the truth and the bike shop in Bega had very little stock, but plenty of goodwill and a phone number in Canberra.

We continued our trip to Cooma, where we stayed at the Alpine Angler's, soon to be the Alpine Country Motel (Ph 6452 4537) A good place to loop the mountain twisties from. Kerryn and Wayne run this place right from the heart. It is a bike friendly place... they even lock it up in their shed if you want.

Here's a picture of the entrance and another of Kerryn and Wayne, the proprietors.(thank you Kane!)



Pizza, Dips and icy cold beer kept the hunger at bay and the chat was hillarious.

Here is a shot of Joey and my bike in front of our respective windows. I call it 'A Room With A View'

Skipp decided to get up real early on Saturday morning and he got himself off to Canberra to get his sprockets and chain fitted, whilst we took ourselves off to Tumut via Brown Mountain. There is a photo of Brown Mountain lookout in the Phillip Island ride report.


Unfortunately I encountered a great deal of blue metal gravel from earlier roadworks (idiots!) right throughout some of the 35s corners and it made me quite shaky for the rest of the stretch. This paranoid loss of mojo stayed with me for most of the day, which disappointed me, but you ride to the conditions and that goes not only for the road and the weather context, but also for the rider's condition.

It was hot... high 30s and we were longing for some cool relief.

We met up with Skipp at Tumut for lunch. A nice, air conditioned country pub.
Tumut Commercial Hotel does Bangers and Mash...have not seen this in quite some time! (Kane's shot)
On the way back to Cooma we turned off towards Cabramurra, Khancoban (revisiting another Phillip Island stopover), Thredbo...oooh what a well maintained road to Jindabyne....noice, noice, noice!

We even had a few drops of rain around Khancoban, which cooled us down a little. The subtle aroma creation of rain hitting freshly laid tar and eucalypt leaves was a neat experience.

Whilst the boys let us two girls take off ahead of them, I was unable to keep up with Joey throughout the twisty sections. Then somewhere amongst my battle for survival they overtook me too.

They'll wait... was the theme of my day.


Well, that beer was nice and cold... and...dare I say: most appreciated.

Perhaps we should suggest to all bike-friendly motel owners to invest in a few little buckets, as Dusty Davis describes in his blog (http://www.dustydavis.com/).

That's the way I'd like to be greeted in the morning!

By the time we made our way from Bombala, the home of our Annual Celebration of Motorcycling, to Pambula, Joey and I decided to take the highway to Narooma, where we met both Mr B and Teza at the Bowling Club for a meal. The boys took off to do another set of twisties from Pambula via Tathra to Narooma.

They arrived five minutes after us with the biggest smiles on their faces... boys!

The traffic stopped near Gerringong and I was glad to be on the bike getting past all of it in good time.

Home at last. Having dodged the biggest rain drops...still quite dry...but more importantly: happy!