St Helens is Still Awesome - Part 2

Friday, 9 October 2020

Many of the orienteers who came up for the week also took their mountain bikes as St Helens is now a fantastic place to ride.  So we went riding nearly every day and it was great.   There are heaps of trails now, including a huge one which opened the day we arrived. 

It was particularly great getting Jett out on his bike as he doesn't get out much, but it was also nice getting out for a ride with orienteering friends which we don't get much chance to do at home.

Meisha and I got ourselves dropped off at Loila Tier so that we could do the long and fun journey back to the trail head. This is a photo from right before my well captured stack..

This is my stack:

 And this is where my bike ended up afterwards.

A few people have asked why Meisha was filming me, given she (presumably) didn't know what was going to happen. It's not really possible to see from the footage but I was attempting to get over a tricky (for me) section of track. I'd already stopped and walked over it before deciding to give it a go on my bike. So while I took myself back up the track to get a run-up, Meisha got in position to take photos of me victoriously overcoming the obstacles.  Unfortunately the spot where I got on the bike didn't give me enough lead-up momentum to clear the last ledge bit in the track, but fortunately Meisha had decided to film the event rather than take photos!

And amazingly, apart from some grazes and broken sunglasses, I was pretty much fine. Which is more than Jon can say after a much less spectacular fall on the Bay of Fires track that we rode a few days later!  He was so concerned about his deepish graze that he visited the fancy new St Helens hospital to make sure it didn't need stitches.  In fact a lot of orienteers visited the hospital that week as a result of various misadventures, the most mundane of which was someone cutting their thumb very deeply from opening the curtains in their accomodation and hitting the rough corner of a brick on their follow through!  

 It was really lovely riding with Jett (and a shame that Zali isn't interested in riding - although to be fair her last new bike was when she was about 12).

We rode down from the Loila Tier a few times together and he also rode with his friends. Jett, Jon and I did the Bay of Fires track with Meisha's family, ending up at Swim Cart beach where we had to wait a while for our personal shuttle busses to arrive.

It was blowing a gale that day so it wasn't pleasant to wait on the beach unless you wanted to have a few layers of skin sandblasted off! 

Unfortunately by the next day the wind had picked even more so the orienteering was cancelled and bush fire alerts were in place for a burn-off that hadn't been put out properly earlier in the week.  After sitting at home smelling the smoke for much of the day we eventually went for a walk at Binalong Bay which was nice.  The next day we were able to run at the last event of the week before driving home.

All up it was a great week. We had such a fun time hanging out and doing things with all our orienteering friends. We are very lucky to live here and have a great orienteering community where everyone is pretty much up for any adventure.