May 9th, 2011
Adelaide to Riverton
Distance: 112km
Total distance: 2615km
Didn’t get much sleep last night, but at least manage to sleep for about 4 hours. Better than my other pre-tour nights! Started pedaling at about 6.40am after saying goodbye to MK. Riding out of Adelaide wasn’t as bad as I thought. For most part, I have a shoulder to ride on. That was in terms of bicycle lane availability. However, in terms of road condition, Adelaide has some of the worse shoulders I’ve ever seen. The shoulders were littered with streams of broken glasses, pieces of truck tires, bitumen debris and gravels. Port Wakefield Road was the worst.
Having said that, I managed to survive the first 35 km or so despite the poor shoulders. Earlier I had planned to enter the bikeway that runs adjacent to the Northern Expressway, entering from Port Wakefield Road. On Port Wakefield Road, the shoulder was clearly marked with the bicycle symbol every few kilometres. On the turnout to the Northern Expressway, there was a sign that says bicycles prohibited on the expressway but NO signs at all that redirect me to the bike way. Do they expect cyclists to just stopped cycling there and hop onto a car? I was hoping to see a bicycle sign further into the express way but after 0.5km, I see nothing. Found a safe spot to park my trike and started browsing online hoping to find some pointers from other cyclists. There was none! Being a new bikeway completed only a few months ago doesn’t help either. For the same reason, this road doesn’t exist in Google satellite images. I looked at my GPS and decided that I should intersect the expressway rather than searching for the bikeway on the road end. But this also means I have to ride back the same shoulder lane since it’s impossible to cross to the opposite lane! I rode very slowly and as far right as I can to avoid being sucked onto the road as there were quite a few trucks that passed. Eventually, after riding some 10km, I found the bikeway at the end of Heaslip Road.
Being a new bikeway, the surface was incredibly smooth. Naturally I start to increase my speed. Less than 5 minutes of riding, my right tire went flat! I inspected the tire and found 4 thorns from the three corner jacks! While replacing the tube, I found out that my rear tire was flat too! This is driving me nuts! A passing cyclist stopped and kindly asked if I needed more patch kits. He explained that the three corner seeds were unknowingly sprinkled onto the bikeway by the lawn mower this morning. Great, now how am I supposed to handle the 20 over km bikeway without 100 punctures? After replacing the tubes, my concentration was all on avoiding the bloody thorns, it’s so much harder to do on a three track trike compared to a single track bike. Thankfully, the thorns soon disappeared after 2km and my nightmare was over.
My remaining ride into Riverton was peaceful and no dramas, except for one unusual encounter with a motorist. While riding, a ute stopped in front of me and the driver came out with a camera pointed at me. I think he was recording a video but I wasn’t entirely sure. Not wanting to ignore this, I stopped and we talked briefly. He asked if I have a website or a blog. I was so surprise, this was the first time anyone had asked for my website. And of course, I gave him my touring name card, with my journal URL on it. Hans mentioned that he’s a professional photographer.
Hans uploaded the video he took of me on youtube:
At Riverton, I checked myself into a caravan park, which was very near to the entrance for the rail trail I’ll be taking tomorrow. No decent take away here so dinner was bacon and cheese rolls I bought from IGA with canned tuna. The temperature tonight was expected to fall to 3 celcius degrees. At 7pm, I was already feeling the cold so I filled up my 4L water container with hot water from the toilet and used it as my makeshift tent heater.
