Day 583 | Agnes River rest area: and do I need some rest

107 km | zzOz total: 19,492 km

I’d probably whack this down as one of the more uninteresting days on the road, not much challenge except to keep those pedals whirring.

The discipline of writing this journal is nearing termination and lucky, I might just be running out of things to say. Making insightful observations of what’s encountered is harder in this more populated, closely settled, landscape, traffic the day’s dominant element. I’ve spun around these parts a few times in the now distant past.

And yet I can still be thrilled by this remarkable country, the day’s highlight a brief encounter with an echidna, that egg laying, twig beaked, sharply spiked non-mammal, semi-oblivious to my attendance, really made my day.

Had a long chat in the middle of nowhere to two bicycling vagabonds, they took the time to roll a cigarette or two, mid-20s, from Perth although they seem to have spent as much time eating pies, hitching lifts with trucks, setting fire to a tent, and sleeping in than actually riding their second hand mountain bikes, their cheap week old panniers already held together with a combination of cable ties and their recommended lashing, Qantas packaging tape, tales of biking around a stray horse’s leg and some motorcycle detritus just off the road, we speculated on what had happened there. Pete had saved cash by salvaging old computers from roadside household waste collections and installing pirated versions of Windows 7, they both seemed to have that happy go lucky attitude to life, get out there and live it rather than stagnate or ossify in the suburbs.

I’m close to moving from this end stage of my own adventure to like that of the Swiss couple I chatted to some time later: talking about their historic trip around NZ 25 years ago. My mathematics came up with a different figure, it’s actually now 28 years ago.

My how time flies, my own trip is almost history too.