Well, it was meant to be a loop, but I took a wrong turn, so it was more like a lasso. I started by rising to the cooks river trail. A route I regularly take.
Then up the cooks river trail itself. There were a few people around, but being the Good Friday holiday they were not so representative of the people who are normally there. People were quite friendly though, and lots of hellos, hi’s and the normal admiration from the smaller peoples.
At Rookwood, I left the cooks river trail and headed east. Unfortunately I decided to follow gut instinct and headed up the wrong road and ended up going around Rookwood rather than through it, which meant that I was on major roads with lots of traffic. After that I headed across town to Guildford. I still followed the main roads, but there was less traffic. I stopped to take photos of a Russian Orthodox church.
It turns out that there as a bike path road one block to the north, but the maps for this part of the world, that I posses, are very lacking. After the half way mark I passes a strange bus only speed hump thingy. On the way there I used the foot path to get around it, but on the way back I found that the trike fits in the bus wheel groove. There were lots of kids playing in that street. In Guildford I stopped for an ice cream. I quite like this little shopping centre and I used to go there from time to time when I lived in Westmead to buy food.
After Guildford I again took a wrong turn and when under the station when I should have gone up the road and crossed over the railway line at the top of the hill. The next part follows the water supply pipeline. This and the subsequent aqueduct were built in the 1890’s as part of Sydney’s new water supply system.
The track is nice and flat and I think that more bicycle paths should follow aqueducts. They are even better than old railway lines as the water flow places much greater restrictions on the topology that they can follow.
On this track I met another rider who used to ride in half triathlons. He had an small accident a few weeks before and was doing his first ride so he rode along with me to pace himself to a lower pace. We had a chat about the evil and somewhattsycophantic Tony Abbot, the American penchant for witch hunts, the latest victim of which is Toyota and a few other things. He continued on when I stopped at the inverse siphon to check my geocache. (This was the main reason for my ride). Embarrassingly I could not find the cache. I did not have the coordinates and there was so much grass I was not sure where the cache was located. I know it is there because the next day someone found it. So not I will have to go back.
At the reservoir I met Abhishek. This is becoming an habit on these rides, but it seems he has moved out to Blacktown and was doing an exploratory ride. After this I forgot to turn my camera back on so there was no footage for a while.
I remembered when I was over in Horsley Park, which strangely is full of horse riding jumps. But I am afraid, no pictures. Then the battery in the camera ran out. So I have learned that the battery runs out before I run out of space on the card. I should have brought my battery powered recharger, but I did not think of this. Next time!
On the way I stopped at a park with a lake and passed quite a few (4 in fact) sculptures to cycling and it’s history.
I headed back thorough Canley Vale. Unfortunately I took a wrong turn and ended coming back through Guildford rather than Blacktown. I had a pie and coke in Guildford and then returned back through Rookwood and the Cooks River trail. All in all about 80km.
Unfortunately, and this has never happened before, when I changed the batteries in the GPS, the file was lost and I only have the trace for the second half of the ride.
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