this is how we roll

On Sunday 25th July I was graced with Mr Tho Pham's presence for a gentle ride through Melbourne's eastern suburbs. My guest brought his decently-sized bike along in the back of a Corolla. He was well-equipped but didn't have a good concept about gears until fifteen minutes into the ride. I like his bike - it's tall enough for me to extend my leg fully in a normal cadence, which is a lot more than what I can do on my ten-year old MTB.

The Eastern Freeway trail was full of promise since I had used it to get to Mr William Xian's house and found the under-road tunnels quite convenient. However, going in the other direction meant light gravel and traffic lights. At Park Road, Donvale, we had to cross to the other side of the freeway due to a lack of path on the southern side. While crossing we encountered some teenage blonde females who seemed to be a bit too apologetic about being on the footpath when we were [not supposed to be but couldn't be bothered crossing the road to ride on the other side]. It reminded me of an article saying how children in China were taught to salute cars.

I found the sight of boomgates on a freeway quite odd.

The back of Donvale/Mitcham was a really nice whup-whup area. Lots of trees - so many that you can't see the houses on the other side. Eerily quiet. Much more than behind a freeway sound barrier which might be good for a home theatre setup. hmm

Nice smells came from the Taberet near Maroondah Highway. The Heatherdale Hungry Jacks was also visible. Tho nearly stacked when turning a corner on the wrong side of the path. An apology was issued.

An error in navigation was made when I didn't notice the turnoff onto gravel away from the Eastlink trail. This landed us at Burwood Highway x Mountain Highway instead of Bunnings 1km west. Riding on Burwood Highway wasn't too bad. Three lanes were plenty. I disposed of two sealed lead-acid batteries and an assortment of Ni-Cd cells at the Whitehorse Waste Transfer Facility. My pack didn't feel a great deal lighter though. Onwards we encountered a dirtbike facility. The gradients on this section were much more manageable than the hills near the Eastern Freeway.

Climbing up High Street Road westwards was a struggle... for Tho. He dismounted. He was lame. Glucogel was procured at a discount pharmacy on Springvale Road and we proceeded to Urban Burger, due to the reasonably generous two burgers for $15 voucher I had in my possession.

At that stage we had covered 26km and settled for lunch at 3PM. The man was nice enough to cut the voucher out himself. We were joined by a white man and an Asian woman. The guy didn't seem very interested in things. The lady thought we were international students and wanted to help us with directions and all that. She spoke to me in mandarin but her four years experience in Melbourne doesn't really beat my whole life here. There were some misunderstandings along the way owing to my crap aural comprehension but some notable points developed during the course of conversation. She took hold of the fact that I trace my roots to Shantou and that the man's great something-or-other was from there and came to Australia for the gold mines. He was not enthusiastic at all about the point that she was making about how he could be related to me. hehe

Our bikes were still secure so we proceeded back to Box Hill via a sort of plan B. Riding on Springvale Road was almost deadly, so we stuck to the service lanes and footpath. I was getting a bit cold on the way back. In total, 38.5km was covered in that afternoon.