Day 3: Sale to Traralgon
The days are starting to heat up, literally. This is a day of real highs, and lows. And for the lows I drank Coke and I was on a high again! Seriously in terms of experiences it was fantastic. It was a Sunday so no school visits but plenty of community engagement.
Let’s start with the usual diary summary…click the link
OK, up (way too) early, ate breakfast then over 100 of us rode the 7 odd km’s down to the East Sale RAAF Base where we proceeded under strict instructions to the runway. We had very very clear guidance that the armed forces appreciate humour about as much as customs officials so we had to be on best behaviour…hmmm
We proceeded through the base to the required location. It’s a pretty impressive setup there. On the tarmac there were 3 generations of the RAAF training jets. Had to get a couple of selfies, including one with the legendary Jens Voigt in front of the newest training jet the RAAF has – still had the wrapping paper on it pretty much.
We were treated to a trainee pilot doing some acrobatics over the top of us which was fantastic, including loops and forced stalls. Click the link below to check it out.
We then proceeded to pull up some chairs onto the tarmac and sat down a couple of senior officers, plus Jodi Harris (a Brisbane training buddy of mine and all round awesome person and TdC legend). It was time to shave the officers hair in honour of a staff member going through chemo. Jodi was a bit short of her fundraising target so she opted to shave all her hair off with the hope of bridging the gap (she raised another $5,000+ towards cancer research for this sacrifice). There was a huge crowd there – military personnel and TdC folks.
OK, so I couldn’t help myself. That’s me sitting shotgun, I’m Goose. A bit squishy for my liking, and no coffee cup holders.
After that we got a very nice and unexpected surprise. We were then given permission to take over the runway and the entire group was allowed to do a hell for leather time trial around it. What a buzz! You don’t get to do that every day.
We were running late and it was time to leave the base and hightail it to Maffra. We have one of the senior Fire and Emergency Services folks from the region riding with us on Tour this year. Great chap and he is doing marvellous work in his community. In very recent times two long standing members of the Maffra fire service lost their battles with cancer and Allan was determined to do something about it. And he is.
Then one of the funniest things on Tour so far happened. Allan was busy talking to his fellow workers and didn’t realise we were ready to leave. There was a group of 30 riders all sitting on their bikes, in the hot sun, waiting to roll out and here was Allan having a gasbag. Then this happened – 30 riders in unison all started chanting his name just like in this youtube clip. I hope you can appreciate the humour like I did. If not, move on.
We got to see one of the oldest firetrucks in Australia, circa mid 1950’s. This escorted us out of town. Amazingly this firetruck was actually used back in 2009 when there was a serious fire breakout and the fire service ran out of vehicles.
We rolled on, eager to get to lunch and then finish the day. It was getting really hot and people were starting to suffer. Unexpectedly we came across a section of a couple of km’s where the road was unsealed and had a lot of loose gravel which made it hard for road bikes to maintain traction. Incident number 2 for the tour happened, and similar to incident number 1 happened right in front of me. One of our riders lost control on the loose surface and came down. I managed to swerve around and not get tangled up. Importantly she was ok.
Finally we made it. Although a shorter day distance wise the heat made it a fair bit tougher.
The stats keep rolling in!
Donation tally update as at 26th March:
Major milestone reached – more than $30k now!!! $30,165 and 90 cents.
Stats update:
Distance ridden: 131km (total = 467km)
Elevation climbed: 580m (total = 2,790m)
Time ridden: 4 hrs 50 min (total = 16 hrs 6 min)
Top speed today: 59 km/hr
Calories burned: 2,435 (total = 8,090 = 32 Big Macs)
Punctures: 0
That’s it for Day 3
DONATION LINK: https://bit.ly/2mm8WyQ
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