Gold Coast via Tamborine

One night this week Jenny asked me what ride the Southbank Bunch was doing. “Redcliffe”, I replied, suspicion in my voice.

“Oh”, she said. “You don’t really like that ride, do you?”

“Well actually I was looking forward to a long flat ride with my friends after the hills of Tour de Dave”

“I just thought that Saturday might be a nice day for the family to go to the coast, maybe you could ride down and meet us.”

And so a plan was formulated. I am keen to keep working on improving my form on the bike and so I wanted to clock up some km’s. I weighed up riding straight down and then later riding home, but eventually decided on a longer ride down. There are various alternatives to straight down the V1 to Southport. I elected to go via Mt Tamborine. It has a 7km climb that is steady and achievable (for me) on the road up from Tamborine Village. So even though the 91km route is significantly shorter than a “ride in-Redcliffe-ride home” SBB ride I thought I should get a pretty good workout.

This is the route from my place to Southport. it can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/62ujf2g

I left home at 6:00am, lights on and wearing arm warmers as the morning was fresh. The forecast was for a fine day with light to moderate southerly breezes in the morning. I was a little surprised at how low my average speed was for the first couple of hours on the bike (about 23km/h) as I would have thought that TdD should have given me some extra horsepower. I am often slow at the start of a ride with a hill in it, I seem to psyche myself out a bit and overdo the conserving of energy.

Between Tamborine Village and the start of the climb I had an unusual incident. I was rolling down a small hill at about 35km/h, in a world of my own, probably solving the world’s problems, when my left peripheral sensed movement. I turned my head and saw a medium sized wallaby eyeball to eyeball coming flat out straight at me. It saw me just as it was pushing off on another tremendous bound out onto the road, and it was able to adjust its trajectory enough to sail past behind me. The incident took less than a second but for me and skippy there was a whole lot of our life crammed into that instant. I was still a bit shaky 2 minutes later when a bunch of 4 fit looking cyclists called out to me as they whizzed past. I almost jumped out of my skin.

The arm warmers came off at the bottom of the climb and my heart and head did battle for the 1^st km of the climb. To me it seems that the gradient gets easier once you hit the long sweeping bends about 3km up. I settled into more of a rhythm and was able to change up a couple of gears in the second half of the climb. I was conscious of the 10.00am rendezvous with the family and so kept going once I had finished the climb. There are a couple of nasty steep bits on the Tamborine plateau, but once through them it was onto a fantastic 3 stage descent. I had a vague plan that today I would pass my personal 15 year old fastest speed on a bike (83km/h). I did this on an aluminium framed Trek hybrid riding this same descent back when my parents lived at Tamborine and I used to frequent the district more often.

I achieved speeds in the 70’s for the first 2 downhills, but cars held me up a bit. For the really big descent I checked that I had some clear road in front of me, then tucked in on the steep, rough (no holes, just heavily textured) road and hung on for grim death. I found visibility a problem as my eyes were watering. About halfway down I moved my hands to the hoods and glanced at the speedo. 84km/h. The corner was approaching and through my tears I could see brake lights. Give it a couple more seconds and then trust in the Campag Record brakes to do their thing. It is like a base jumper knowing when to pull the ‘chute.  I was behind a car for the rest of the roll down the mountain. I check of the stats showed 85km/h max. A real thrill for me but as Margie tweeted to me later it was a good job the roo didn’t jump out during that descent! No doubt more experienced downhillers could get a lot more out of that descent but on the day it was good enough for me.

From the bottom of the hill to Oxenford are some rolling hills and one mongrel 12% hillock that I had to stop on for a breather. After Oxenford it was a flat 22km around Hope Island and onto the tourist strip. Once on the flat I felt my legs come back a bit, although my backside had decided that the ride should already be over. A piece of metal through the back tyre 5km out from the finish held me up for 8 minutes and then I was at Southport, rolling around the foreshore and looking for my beloved.

Ride stats: 91km, 21.5km/h average, 6:00am start 10:30am finish. Top speed 85km/h. Tamborine climb 38 minutes.

What a beautiful day it was. The smaller kids and I had a swim, they played on the wonderful facilities in the park across from Australia Fair, we had Red Rooster for lunch at Main Beach, we went  into SeaWorld for a few hours looking at the penguins and the seal show, and also Renee and I tried out one of the new rides. Jenny did the drive home and we had a good chance to catch up with each other. All in all a top day. And at night Nick O’Donnell showed me how to make a profile chart from a google map, no Garmin or anything!