I went for a ride with Gonzo the weekend after the prince\u2019s red-headed stepchild married the stripper. We stopped for lunch at the Gold and Fleece hotel at Windeyer. They ask your name when you order lunch there and I was going to be Max Power, but Gonzo ended up ordering and told them his name was Bill.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t get it either.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome to Ben\u2019s with me on the ninth\u201d, I urged him. \u201cWe will drink whiskey and shoot kangaroos. Ben says the place over the road is over-run. He shot twenty three the night before last and thirteen last night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gonzo said sorry, and he\u2019d love to, but he\u2019d accidentally bought a Volvo on the Internet and had to fly to Townsville to pick it up.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was very careless of you\u201d, I admonished him.<\/p>\n
We had lunch, and I split my front tyre on the dirt roads on the way home. We tried to patch it and with two plugs in it I managed to ride it a while, but it didn\u2019t hold and I left it outside the bike shop at Lithgow. Gonzo doubled me home on his CB1300.<\/p>\n
I got the bike shop to put a new tyre on it, and went up by train to pick it up the next Friday. The train fare was eight dollars fifty. It was outrageous. They didn\u2019t even have a bar.<\/p>\n
I went to Ben\u2019s the weekend after that. It had been drizzling rain for four days and the road was pretty slick in the clay sections. On one of them I headed for the dry stuff on the left because the road turned and I didn\u2019t want to collide head-on with something coming the other way. There was some dead tree in the way which made the angle a bit sharper than I liked, and I lost the front when the tyre tread filled up with wet clay.<\/p>\n
The bike fell over. It was really slippery, and I couldn\u2019t pick it up. Petrol started pouring out of the breather tube. I had mobile phone reception, just, and I called Ben. I was only a kilometre or so from his place. He came down in the 4-runner with young Tyson from up the road.<\/p>\n
Young Tyson was sixteen. He had a Yamaha trail bike. He looked at my bike. \u201cNice bike\u201d, he said. He looked at the clay and the front tyre. \u201cThat tyre\u201d, he said, and snickered.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re called adventure tyres,\u201d I told him. \u201cThey\u2019re really good on tar. And on hard packed dirt.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow\u2019s your adventure working out then?\u201d asked Ben.<\/p>\n
They got the bike up. I rode it to Ben\u2019s. \u201cThat was hilarious watching the front wheel in my mirror when you were steering out the front end slides\u201d, he said when we got there.<\/p>\n
We had dinner and mounted the spotlight on the 4-runner and got the rifles. Ben made us all swear not to shoot each other, and we went hunting. Ben had the radio tuned to the only station you can get out there, 2JJJ.\u00a0 <\/span>They had a feminist academic on talking about the problem of \u201cincels\u201d. She said it was caused by men who regarded women as vending machines into which you could insert \u201ckindness tokens\u201d and sex would come out.<\/p>\n We howled with laughter. Admittedly, we\u2019d been drinking.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2019Kindness tokens\u2019\u201d, said Ben.<\/p>\n \u201cMy sides\u201d, I gasped.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a roo\u201d said Tyson, who hadn\u2019t been drinking and was manning the spotlight.<\/p>\n \u201cPut a kindness token in his head, Al\u201d, said Ben.<\/p>\n You had to be there, I guess. We shot kangaroos for an hour. Then we went back to Ben\u2019s place and poisoned ourselves with American whisky.<\/p>\n It was a severe poisoning. I wasn\u2019t up to riding until midday the next day. Ben followed me to Sallys Flat in the car in case I crashed again. I didn\u2019t, but it was still pretty slippery.<\/p>\n There was a ten kilometre traffic jam outside Lithgow. I didn\u2019t want to lane split with the panniers on, so I made a U-turn outside the prison and detoured via Rydal.<\/p>\n I rode into the car park under my apartment around 17:00. The guy from upstairs was cleaning out his garage and had a pile of junk outside. \u201cHi Al\u201d, he greeted me. \u201cWhere have you been?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOut west\u201d, I told him. I gave him the salient points. \u201cCrashed on clay. Shot some \u2018roos.\u201d<\/p>\n He checked out my bike. \u201cNo damage\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cYep\u201d, I said. \u201cAre you throwing that stuff out?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGot to make room\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat vacuum cleaner broken?\u201d \u00a0<\/span>I asked.<\/p>\n \u201cNah\u201d, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost new. It was just collecting dust.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cThey\u2019re called adventure tyres,\u201d I told him<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1252480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[221],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252347"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1252536,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252347\/revisions\/1252536"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1252480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}