Easter Saturday 2009 Rod, Tracey and I set off on a mini cycle tour of northeast Victoria to test out our equipment and bodies as a trial run for our big trip to Europe in three weeks. This is the three of us ready to start pedaling.
Pat
It rained as we passed through Wodonga but we managed to find shelter under a bridge then in a bus shelter. We stopped in Chiltern for a coffee then headed towards Beechworth. We were all interested to see how we would go on the climb up to Beechworth with our loaded bikes. This is Tracey reaching the top in fine form.
Easter is the busiest weekend of the year in Beechworth, but there was not too much traffic on the road from Chiltern. Once we hit the Wodonga road the traffic was terrible, but we survived the last few km alive and well as you can see.
Since the campgrounds in Beechworth were full we camped the night in the back yard of our friend Paul's office, where the amenities were very good but being next door to the pub carpark made for a very noisy night.
Sunday morning we had a very pleasant ride down the rail trail to Everton and on to Bowser. We then had a long grind into a head wind along the Three Chain Road to Rutherglen, where we pitched out tents (if you can call Rod's body bag a tent?), got clean and changed and met our four boys and their grandmothers at the Tuileries for lunch.
Sunday evening we met some friendly neighbouring campers who invited us to share their camp fire. After a pretty good night's sleep we headed home via a coffee and cake at Chiltern. Between Chiltern and Barnawatha we ran into Cheryl, Helen and Poppy.
The ride home was very pleasant and we celebrated a successful trial run with lunch at La Maison in Wodonga.