Recce Trip Day 3, Coleraine to Melbourne

This sort of map was transferred to my phone for navigation.

Wind blew my bike over near Mount Napier.

Mount Napier road out of Hamilton

It was windy and wet riding through the Macarthur wind farm.

 

This is near the top of the big hill out of Coleraine, by far the biggest hill of the day.

(Continued from Here )

The last day of my recce trip to Coleraine was the trip back to Melbourne. I was hemming and hawing about whether to ride back to Ararat, or even whether to ride through Merino to get to Warrnambool and take the train from there. In the end I decided to go via a bike friendly route to Warrnambool and catch the train. I researched the route with my Chromebook laptop and didn't use any gps guidance, just marked my intended route in my map book, and photographed the various maps using my phone. When I was riding I just referred to my phone pictures which was easy. It was sometimes wild, wet and windy weather, but the wind was northwesterly and basically a tailwind the whole way - about 120k I think. 

The small town of Hawksdale was on my route. Its main shop is a post office and milk bar and I replenished supplies there - mainly with something to drink as my bottle was empty. 

I got into Warrnambool at about 4, with about 2 hours before the train left, and was happy  to sit around and read and wait. This last train to Melbourne for the evening was busy but not crowded. I switched trains in Melbourne and arrived home about 9:30. I was quite lucky that I did not have to catch a Coach-replaces-train-service. Extensive closures for upgrades began the next day as documented here .

After a week or two of being back home I've thought about things and come to a few conclusions:

* It was good to take my Chromebook computer with me, although it weighs 2.3kg with case and charger I enjoyed using it while away to process photos, write blogs and plan routes. On the other hand the Vicroads map book I had with me weighs 1.3 kg, and I only used about 5% of the maps in it. Sorry, map book, you were a bit of an unwanted passenger!

* The leaning trike went really well but there are still some changes I want to make to it. These are rear fairing  / tailbox mods, enlarging it so my shoulders and head and helmet are faired as well as my trunk. This will mean redesigning the fairing frame kit documented here . Hope to get to it eventually!

* It would be nice if regular V-Line Bus-Coaches took standard size bikes. There is more on that in an entire separate blog post here!