The first ride of the New Year

I‘ve been living in Melbourne for 13 years as of now, and in that whole time I have never been to Sorrento or Queenscliff, or taken the ferry from one to the other yet I’ve always talked about it. That’s the thing about actually having some time to yourself and no priors. So I set myself a round loop and took off headed towards Geelong and a neat 230km loop for the first afternoon run of the New Year.

 

The run to Geelong (in fact the whole way) is freeway cruising and as boring as bat shit, but like I tried to say in the opener, it was more for the destination than the journey today and I’m trying to wind off a few kms on the clock to the first service mark before I get back to work. And as uneventful as it was I still really enjoyed myself. I found I was right at home, I have sort of become more at one with it at last.

 

Looking at the passing freeway signs ‘Geelong 99km’ I thought, ‘oh that’s not far’ and just kept riding. I’m totally comfortable riding it more than a 100km stretch at a time and have started to think nothing of it. Thank god for the Sargent Seat. Touring around the Alpine Mountains and doing some more riding in general this holidays has helped me get back into a groove with riding the Hyper, and I still love it and everything it gives me. Bar that stupid fuel tank of course.

The ferry from Queenscliff to Sorrento runs every hour, on the hour from 7am to 7pm. I unfortunately pulled in at 2:10pm so I had 50mins to kill so I took a run up to the ‘Beach Lookout’, spotted on my way in. My hurry to get to the ferry already forgotten I just stopped and breathed in some ocean air.

Getting on the ferry and heading across the bay took 45mins and in that time and in my general malaise I managed to stuff a pie down my throat and as the ferry slowly turned around and began heading into the bay, I felt slightly green.Sea-sick kind of green.

Then I remembered I didn’t like boats very much.

A bit late for that now, I took myself out onto the front  and got some air for the rest of the trip and before you know it we’re told to get ready for disembarking (can you tell I am not familiar with boating terms?). Thank god cause in general as a non-swimming person, boats and deep water terrify me. Why was I doing this again?

Oh that’s right, I’m in some mad panic to get to the 12,000km mark before I have to go back to work, so that I can get my first service done before the ADR. Ahh now I remember.

And with that in mind and not much more I got off in Sorrento and felt like I had landed at Surfers Paradise for all the tourist beach traffic and promptly got wedged behind 10 million tourists trying to leave Sorrento via the only one-lane road back out onto the freeway.

That’s where the Hyper can truly come into its own though, squirting in and out of tight jams and filtering past all of the stalled traffic. Making the most of being able to see for miles ahead of anyone else I picked my gaps and got out of the jam onto the freeway home again pretty quick.

Looking at the odo upon arrival I now have a meagre 460km to go before the first major service. I’ll do that easily by Friday as I got another call confirming another ride date for later this week. Making the most of the time off I couldn’t be happier with all of this down time, awesome weather and time to ride my bike.

Hope you’re doing the same, happy New Year everyone.