THEY HAVE NO SOUL, YOU KNOW
I couldn’t leave for the Tumbarumba TT with Boris and Bly and the others on Thursday. They were cutting over to a new ERP system at work on 1 April, and Thursday was 31 March.
At 2130 on the evening of 31 March the office was still humming with accountants and consultants and managers. I don’t work on the accounting side, but there had to be a way that I could help make 1 April better.
So I downloaded a Canon logo and made up some signs and laminated them and got one of the managers to help me stick one to each copier on each floor.
Hilarity ensued on 1 April, but not as much as I had planned, because I wasn’t riding to the Tumbarumba TT. I decided I would ride down on the Saturday. Google Maps said it was five hundred and four kilometres and I could get there in five hours, but I would have to slab it down the Hume Highway.
I couldn’t. It would destroy my soul, and it is far too late in life for me to be developing red hair; so I rode over the mountains on the Bells Line of Road, and through Georges Plains and Barry and Neville and down the Mid Western Highway to Cowra. It was a great ride, in perfect weather.
I don’t think I’d ever stopped in Cowra before. There’s a memorial there to a prison break in 1944, when three hundred and fifty nine Japanese prisoners of war broke out of their camp. Two hundred and thirty one died and a hundred and eight were wounded from charging machine gun emplacements and such. I am told that Seiji Ogi, the ringleader, told his men to die like the carp. I have seen carp die, and it usually involves them flopping around on the dirt on their side gasping. I fail to see the attraction, but Ogi’s men thought that it was a good idea, apparently.
The Japanese are an inscrutable race, and have foolish moments.
I filled my tank and headed east to the Snowy Mountains, and found Tumbarumba. There were maybe a hundred people drinking at the caravan park. I joined them, and drank Gromit’s wine, which gave him an excuse to open a second bottle, and listened to the stories of the riding that day, and ate a meaty dinner hot from the grill.
The next morning Bly decided that slabbing it up the Hume would destroy HIS soul, too, so we went back the way I came. We rode the winding roads of the Snowy Mountains, and the lonely high speed straights of the Central West. The weather remained perfect. We stopped in Manduramah for a pub lunch in a shady beer garden.
I got home about 1700, after a satisfying blast over the Bells Line of Road. The GPS said I’d done over thirteen hundred kilometres since the previous morning.
I unpacked my bags. I had a hot shower. It was most relaxing. My soul felt undestroyed. I dried off and checked my hair in the mirror.
There was not a tinge of ginge.
About the Author
Al Al does a bit of everything, and likes hanging around with Boris, because there are generally motorcycles and whiskey, and because hilarity generally ensues. He wastes his spare time not moderating the BIKE ME! forums, where he posts occasionally and is regarded as unfair, unbalanced and unmedicated. Shows how much THEY know.
