Day 575 | Jindabyne: and a lovely cosy bed

106 km | zzOz total: 19,051 km

Life is full of surprises.

For a start, today dawned all misty, or maybe it was just low cloud, my fingerless gloves now with their additional ventilation have reconfigured themselves as fingerless mittens, it’s cool speeding down the long downhill to Adaminaby.

Then I find I have the wrong configuration of the landscape in my head, for some reason I’ve always assumed Lake Eucumbene drains to the west, but I find that is due to large diameter engineered tunnels diverting the water via hydro electric power stations to the irrigation schemes out west, the natural flow is, in fact, to the Snowy River which flows to the Pacific.

I’m climbing the Great Dividing Range once again, three crossings in two days in this goofy alpine loop, it’s almost lunchtime, there’s 60 km of more hills to Jindabyne.

Everything equalises when the place I assumed from my map I’d be climbing turns into a superb 25 km downhill run into Berridale. From there I’m in another grinding climb before a view of the remarkably cliched azure Lake Jindabyne at full capacity below.

Those last few climbs into Jindabyne are no particular surprise, what was is the new concrete path at the dam that turns unexpectedly into a mountain bike path with fast banking turns and a little less vertical oscillation than the shoulderless road at this point.

I’ve even arrived at my predicted time, after the most hours in the saddle for one day in the last four years, but it really has been such a pleasure, didn’t even mind the last 28 km on the Monaro Highway due to an always adequate shoulder.

Guess it shouldn’t be such a surprise that Syd lives in the top street in town, (almost), and for the first time today I resort to a 20 m walk-the-bike, the slope just too much for these tired limbs.