Escaping the Mountain.

After two days relaxing on the top of a cold windy mountain the time came to make good our escape. We woke up pretty early to zero visibility, no wind and no rain. OK two out of three would have to do .. time to load up the bikes and see if we could find our way down the other side.

With Lakes Entrance out of the picture, the plan was to make it as far as we could each day til we got to our final destination, Bermagui on the south NSW coast. As far as we could make it each day on this trip would mean from 200 to 250km. We didn't wanna push, we were on holidays.

Here's the map for this day ...




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So slowly does it down the mountain. We'd talked to a couple who had just come up that side, and they said the cloud was only about 5 km down the side of the mountain then it cleared completely. And it did. Our first stop was at a little town called Omeo, though I couldn't remember that name and kept calling it after my favourite biscuit, Oreo.

There wasn't a real lot to this little village, the mountains were a lot more open here than on the other side, and there were more grass lands and a lot less trees. We'd been told about this cool little cuckoo clock shop, but as we'd somehow managed to lose half the day already (I don't know how we do this, we get up with the birds then it's lunch time before we even know it!) we didn't go and explore inside.

So after waiting what felt like an hour for our pies and coffee at the local bakery, and also checking out the very nice HD's that pulled up near us, we went on our merry way.

It was a lovely ride but I'm afraid the GoPro was pointed through a very dirty screen by now, and the pics just aren't good enough to show. You'll just have to take my word for it, grassy rolling hills surrounded us for much of this part of the trip. I spotted a sign for a lookout and said to Terry that I'd like to see if I can see anything there.

Turning into the turn off for it was well .. interesting is a word. You had to do a very sharp left turn then the track to the lookout doubled back to go in the opposite direction. And there was gravel. Now some of that gravel was not to bad, but at the edges it had piled up into nice lose deep piles of evilness. Of course I took the corner too wide as I nearly always do and ended up in the middle of one of those piles, Roxy just kinda sank then drifted in it and I ended up standing straddling her while she had a rest. Terry and I couldn't even pick her up because she was buried in that gravel, a nice man stopped and helped us. I love the way that people are always so ready to help while you are travelling round this country, and that's another person who I'll be eternally grateful to.

Then I got straight back onto Roxy (after checking she was OK) and made my way the 200 meters up the gravel to park and see if the lookout was worth it.

At first glance we couldn't work out where the lookout was. To us a lookout is when you are up high and looking across at amazing scenery. This one was just kinda showing us the mountain range from a flat bit of ground, you couldn't see very far at all.

While we were there those HD's we'd been looking at pulled in, one of them was a lady and that was one nice machine she was riding. She looked a bit tenuous on that gravel too and I was praying for her right up til she pulled up next to Roxy. We had a bit of a chat and they told us how nice the road we were soon to be travelling was. I didn't wanna take a pic of their bikes, I'm never quite sure how people would like that, but did get one of the our babies.

Back on the road, and we started travelling next a lovely little creek. Sorry again no pics. I could have taken one when we stopped by the side of the road once, but I didn't think of it. We'd stopped because Terry told me that my number plate was just about to fall off. Oops, as soon as I touched it, once we'd found somewhere safe to stop, it dropped to the ground. Into the saddlebags and back on the road, we only had a few more km's to go to get to Orbost, I'd risk riding without and put it back on once we were settled into a motel.

We grabbed a coffee in Orbost then rode for only two blocks to find a motel for the night. Time to relax for a while, after putting the number plate back on of course. The holes where it was attached to the bike had worn bigger and the bolts just slipped through. I put some rubber thingys in the holes first this time, some washers and re-attached it. It worked.

Oh yeah and just one other nice pic, I cant remember the name of this place, it's where we had turned off to head towards Orbost, we'd just stopped near a park to have a sit in the shade and a drink. It's amazing how much warmer the day had gotten once we left the mountain. I loved this old house and wonder what it's like inside.