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We looked at the weather and weren’t exactly thrilled. Quite a number of bands of rain coming and one pretty strong one had come through already. Kristie made us coffee and breakfast and we continued our chats of the night before. Gary had left for work early. We packed the bikes up and waited for a clearing.
It finally came about 10:30. We said good-bye and thanks to Kristie and Shirley and headed out. It started raining again soon after, but fortunately not a downpour. We stopped at Woolworths on the way out of town for a few things and by the time we finished, the sun was shining again. We stopped in Kempsey for a bathroom/lunch break. A surprising number of the benches in the town were already taken by what we learned later were probably homeless folks, and that Kempsey was noted for it’s low-income population. Not our first encounter with homeless, but more concentrated here than in the other cities, and nothing on the scale of what we’d seen in the US. We found an empty bench by the Aldi’s, grabbed some Cokes, and were treated to a lunchtime show of a husband and wife fighting with three kids in tow. They were seated and standing around another bench nearby and this went on for the rest of our lunch. They were occasionally joined by other various people, and another kid getting off of a school bus. We were glad when we finished and got out of there. Nice little town otherwise.
Today, 34 of our 68 miles were on the Pacific Highway. Mostly decent riding and the traffic wasn’t too busy. Just as we were about to get off the highway for our last segment to Talarm, we could see a storm coming at us. We quickly put on the raincoats and the rains came. Quite hard. And while the GPS said there was only 1.5 miles of gravel road ahead of us, it was more like 5 miles, with water and mud running down them. Hilly, too, and my bike started making odd noises. Not a good time for a breakdown. Seems like too many days our rides end with a climb. That was the case today, too, but thankfully, by the time the hill came, the rain had abated.
Tonight we are staying with Janet’s and Ian’s daughter Amy and her husband Harry, and their three children. We had hoped to see Janet again, but she had left on Saturday. She said that Amy was insistent that we stay there anyway, and we were thankful she did. On arriving, we parked our bike on the whole-house veranda, right outside a door to our room. Very cool house, and Amy is as lovely a host as her mom.
We were soaked, though, and quickly stripped off our wet things and had showers and then joined Amy in the kitchen. We cooked our rice and Amy brought out some other dishes and we had a nice meal and washed it down with some wine. Harry had been putting the kids to bed and he joined us for a little while before he had to leave to get the train to Sydney. He worked remotely most of the time, but occasionally had to go into the office. It was an overnight trip for him and he had the routine of sleeping on the train and getting to the office in the morning down pat. He’s an IT guy, so I had some interesting conversations with him about that subject — security concerns and the coming AI apocalypse. Nice couple, and we were looking forward to meeting their kids in the morning. We put a load of laundry in and said our good-nights. Another good end to another hard day.
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