The way points of this bicycle route:
CAUTION: one lane bridge.
A short but steep climb starts here.
The real climb starts somewhere about here. Onwards and upwards for the next 6 km or so.
A couple of light showers hit us while riding up the hill, but nothing serious. We also saw a helicopter carrying a ground-penetrating radar doing a geological survey.
We arrived at the top of the hill in bright sunlight, only to look back to the south and see a black wall of cloud coming towards us at a great rate of knots. From then on it was a race to morning tea!
A nice fast downhill about here; just as well with a storm chasing us!
A howling southerly and the first serious splashes of rain started just as we were powering our way up this hill to what we thought was our morning tea destination. But no: it was the wrong homestead :(
The weather degenerated further into a hail storm. We sheltered from it behind some pine trees next door to the Longdale Station homestead. The trees kept the hail off, but didn’t provide much cover from the wind. Fortunately most of us had cold weather gear with us anyway, which went on very quickly! The tail cars came through a few minutes later and picked everyone up, leaving the bikes to be washed and collected later :)
Morning tea consisted of scones with jam and cream, muffins, eclairs and hot coffee or tea, in the wonderfully WARM and DRY lounge at Highlay Homestead. Great hospitality from Donna and Paul O’Neill. The scones were fantastic!
The official route carried on to the north along Four Mile Road then onto Mareburn Road down through Mareburn Station, eventually coming out just above the bridge at the bottom of the Macraes road. Only five people took this option, however, the rest taking a short cut back to Hyde down Four Mile Road.
A reasonable descent down this road, a bit corrugated in places, complicated somewhat by the very strong and bitterly cold southerly.
Watch out for some nasty corrugations somewhere along here. Don’t get up too much speed on them, or you might have trouble braking for the corner at the bottom.
I got blown right across the road on this last stretch by a huge gust of wind. Luckily I was already braking when it hit, and was basically stopped by the time I rolled into the ditch on the right hand side of the road.
CAUTION: one lane bridge. Those who followed the official route rejoined the main road here.
The turn-off to the old Railway Station and the Rail Trail is somewhere about here.
Welcome to Bikely, take a step by step tour of this path:
Press Start Tour - then use the navigation buttons below to move along the path.
Tagged with: Recreational, Onroad, MTB, Smooth, Steep, Basic, Low traffic, Rough, Rural, Scenic, Touring
