When You Don't Know

The imagination takes over when the unknown is to be considered. El Dorado or Utopia are good examples. My case is a little closer to home.

For years I have been riding a route where some people have said that they would return by Mountain Creek Road. Well I knew where this road was, it was to the west, where the mountains were, where the hillbillies lived and where only the strongest of riders went. Not for me as I imagined one in ten climbs and gravel roads with rocks the size of boulders.

Then one day, looking at a local map, I noticed that Mountain Ck Rd came within a few kilometer of my home and thought here is an opportunity to check this road out, so off I set to the water sewerage treatment plant, and from there, it would be a simple matter of crossing the Murrimbidgee and track up to this mysterious road.

Unfortunately, when I got to the sewerage works, I found cliffs and impenetrable terrain so gave up, this merely reinforced my perceptions. Later found a longer route via tracks marked on a map, and then using Google Maps, was able to navigate to just west of the river, but Google Maps came up with "Limit of Maps". This road was getting more terrible by the day.

A plan was hatched to ride to Mountain Ck Rd. A friend came back after traveling the route by 4WD and warned of some steep, read walking, sections. Then a lady friend of age about 50 told me her boyfriend had given her a ride on his motorbike and reached the ton (in miles per hour) on Mountain Ck Rd. This didn't make sense to my perceived state of the road.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we rode off a couple of days ago and while the riding was hard to get there, once there, the road turned out to be a flat bituminous high speed road with no traffic.

Perceptions can be misleading!

File::Find::Duplicates

Over the Easter weekend, I amassed some 6000 odd photos into a 12 GByte partition. There were some duplicates and mused as to how to find them. As usual, I figured someone has had this problem before and solved it, so a Google search turned up a Perl module, File::Find::Duplicates, an add on to File::Find.

Just copied the example out of the documentation and bingo, off it went and found 181 duplicates within a minute.

Haven't looked into how it works, but seems if it finds two files the same size, it then md5sums them (or some other hash) to see if they are the same file. Cool!

NSW - BBR Comments

Bike Maintenance

Five weeks before the ride, my cluster went, so a new cluster and chain was put on.

One week before the ride, re greased the rear axle and ball bearings, they would have needed doing anyway. Also purchased a new rear tyre, a Schwalbe Marathon to match my front one. Good tyres they are.

Day one of the ride, after 8000 plus Km, there came a click in the right pedal. Day two it became worse and could actually feel the "broken ball bearing" or whatever through my shoe. Bought a new set of pedals from the traveling Pegasus shop.

Day four of the ride, I discarded the bike stand. It was probably ten years old and worn to such an extent that every time I hit a bump, it extended, dangerous, but not only that, every time it happened, one of the other thousand riders would tell me, "Your stand is down".

Body Maintenance

Had been in training for some time, doing 60 - 90 Km rides. Four weeks before the start, did what was for me a fairly hard 92 Km ride. Rested the next day and the on the third day, I was almost crippled, no power in the knees which were sore as well.

I just rested, took things easy, the doc gave me some anti inflammatories which didn't do anything. Started to prepare myself psychologically for failure.

Anyway to cut a long story short, days one, two and three weren't too bad, just took it easy, used one gear down and walked when I had to. On the fourth day, I was riding along and suddenly noticed I didn't have a knee problem, and that state continues to this day. Why?