Parklands Club and Rookie Ride Summary – 14/01/2018

Parklands Club and Rookie Ride Summary – 14/01/2018

So how hot was Sunday at your place? It was bloody hot at Parklands! 36°C to be exact. Now most normal people would stay at home in the air conditioning, go to the beach or get some of those handy suppositories you can keep in the freezer. But not us, no way! We went for a bike ride – heat stroke be damned!!

Now it wasn’t just the two groups of Bushrangers keen for a ride this day, the Radar Hill road carpark was overflowing with all the riders hitting the black track early while it was still cooler. The regular club ride started off from the Aitkenson Road side with Alf “Putting the A in ABBA” Cerwen and the rookie ride group started from the Radar Hill Road side led by me.

The Club Ride

Alf lead his 20+ riders on a challenging 20km route up Double Dab then through Cancer Tree and Road Rage. They then rode the new green and black trails and then back across the park to the cars. The heat and humidity definitely made things tougher (“especially for the Europeans” Alf said). But everyone had enough water and kept in the shade. Lou had a tumble off the Hobbit bridge in Cancer Tree but came out fine. Word is some crazy bugger on this ride is training for a 6000km self-supported endurance ride – I’ll find out more and let everyone know the details – sounds pretty interesting.

Thanks for leading the ride Alf and I’m sorry to hear that no-one wanted to listen to your excellent jokes. I’m sure they were comedy gold and politically correct as always.

The Rookie Ride

The Rookie ride started with 13 riders (which then grew to 17 as we discovered more riders on our journey). Before we started I gave everyone a brief pep talk with 3 rules – check your bikes, drink water and don’t die. Everyone excelled in these tasks beautifully – nice work Team Rookie!

We rode from the carpark to the beginning of the green loop and everyone road the loop at their own pace for a bit until we regrouped back at the container. We then went down Road Rage and up and around the Gumby Loop. Ended up being a perfect 10km and 2 hrs by the time we got back to the car and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

Thanks to John, Dave and Nick for being tail-end charlie for me. I hope everyone had fun and I’ll see you again next weekend for another rookie ride.

Yours truly,

Michael “It’s OK, we have a 10% loss policy on group rides” Johns
Club Secretary