Day 521 | Near Steingarten vineyard: overlooking the Barossa
26 km | zzOz total: 16,874 km
I wasn’t exactly lost, let’s just say I was off the official track.
I’d finally picked up a couple of free local tourist maps in Tanunda after spending the morning updating blogs in the Nurioopta Library, fine facilities, and a smiling princess zipping through the registration process to book me into the free internet you can enjoy in South Australia, those gorgeous deep brown eyes hinting at future romance, but with someone somewhere else, when I’m somewhat more stable and stationery. I haven’t had that thought for a while, after all I enjoyed almost continuous serial partnerships with a series of wild and dangerous women since I was 17, I’m still enjoying this brief second teenagehood respite out on the road.
Maybe I wanted to get off that major Barossa Valley Road, it’s busy, narrow and only sporadic shoulders, but the map I had of the area wasn’t showing the Mawson Trail, and the adjacent map with the pink line, well, was adjacent, I was off the edge of that map just working backwards from three and a half year old memory.
I stopped at the top of one rise and could see the faint two ruts of one farm track heading up the hill, and further in the distance a more distinct road. It seemed I turned too soon and the closer I examined those ruts they did not look at all familiar, I should have been on that next road, but by then I’d biked some distance up the valley side and being late in the day, 5 pm, not wanting to return to the bottom of the valley and reclimb.
Solution: cross country.
There were no fences, I plunged along the edge of the vines, I’d just link through to that other road surely not more than a k away, the ground hadn’t been ploughed and the going good. That was OK but suddenly I got to the end of the row, right in front a barbed wired fence of ancient provenance, but just up there an equally old gate with a track going down to a creek and up the other side, a dogleg, a turn to the left and then I was in the back of a small winery, pedalling quickly in my granny cog up the hill, sadly making limited progress. Now where, past the front door of the house, obviously pedals still whirring and out on the driveway still going slow up the hill.
I survived okay, this road looked more familiar and now the long climb out of the Barossa Valley continued on track.
In the end I just camped up on the top with an enormous view of the Barossa, looking as far as Gawler and seeing the shining sea, the Spencer Gulf, way in the distance.