They lied...
Ten minutes down the road, a gray cloud rolled above my head depositing a lot more than I would suggest being 'a shower'. Not to worry, my bike and leathers were in need of a wash anyways, so it was good to get the rain over and done with for the day.
I had barely scrubbed in a new set of Metzler Sports M1's, showing a grand total of 200k's on them and todays run down through the Gold Coast hinterlands would give me a chance to get rid of those stripes on the side and see how they perform over my old Bridgestone BT010's (wrecked after 7000k's).
So the rain had gone, the skies were blue with big white fluffy clouds abound. There were some gray ones, but they were on the distant horizon so I had nothing to worry about. Down through the city and onto the freeway for a scoot down towards the Gold Coast, the police were out enforce as per usual selling tickets to their ball. Fifty minutes later I saw my turnoff to go down past the natural bridge and some nice big sweepers of fun. But looking towards the mountains, those gray clouds that were so distant before were looming larger than life exactly where I wanted to go.
The straight and narrow was dry as a bone, but as if on queue, the skies opened up as I approached the first nice bend. 'Crap' I said to myself, slowing down a lot more than I wanted to be at this point. I took these fairly easy, not wanting to get onto the smooth edges of the tyres not yet scrubbed and having the bike step out in a nasty fashion. They felt great, even in these conditions so the next few corners I pushed harder little by little. Leaving the last of the first set of corners the rain started to pout down by the bucket. "it'll clear up soon", I kept thinking as I pushed on through the hinterlands.
Sure enough after a time the rain eased off a little, the sky started to show some blue, and I was greeted by some spectacular cloud formations coming down off the mountain side...
Full image at http://members.iinet.net.au/~bigsteve/wetBB01_lge.jpg
The mountain side seemed to merge with the cloud banks. I found it hard to believe that at midday (when these pictures were taken) that the clouds would stay like this.
Continuing down the road the clouds stayed nice and low, hugging the mountainside, dipping down under the treeline.
Coming towards the end of the hinterlands was this last picture, I sat here for a few minutes, the cloud was actually falling down the side of the mountain like a slow moving waterfall
The roadway was still damp, but the rain had mostly gone. A light drizzle remained as I crossed over the border into New South Wales. The name of this township caught my eye...
I stopped off for a coffee at the town of Mooball... famous for... erm...
The power poles in the whole town were painted cow skin, the servo was painted like cow skin, rocks in the fields were painted like cow skin. I ordered a cuppachino, and even it had cow spots! A great place to visit.
I continued on towards Byron Bay to fuel up, the rain had come back so I decided not to head to the beach today, but head inland for my planned trip home. A wrong turn somewhere had lead me to a 30km dirt road, the skies opened once more making me feel cold and miserable, so instead of trying to guess where I should have gone, I backtracked and headed up back through the hitnerlands, hoping the weather would have cleared there by now.
I was wearing vented summer gloves which were soaked through, when I remembered what my luxury bike came with... mmmmmm warm hands again! The rain didn't relent as I rode, quite a few large puddles were on the road, so I headed through cautiously. A right turn ahead had smooth bitchumen on it, so I backed right off, unfortunatley the road was still greasy and the back stepped out quite alarmingly, I was fortunate enough not to put the bike down here, but a change of undies was due on my return home.
About to cross back into Queensland, I saw that the clouds were now below me...
full image at http://members.iinet.net.au/~bigsteve/wetBB09_lge.jpg
No more blue sky on my return trip, the valley which seemed so stunning before, now was dark, gray and drab.
It wasn't until the point where the rain had started that the skies cleared again and stayed that way all the back to Brisbane, at which time it was 5:30pm sweet enough to hit right smack bang in the middle of peak hour traffic.
This was my first big ride that the weather had stayed fairly bad most of the day, travelling about 300k's in the wet through more twisty roads. While it was not the best weather I could hope for, I would have missed out on some spectacular views if I had turned around earlier in the peice.
The Metzler's worked well, still not fully scrubbed, but thats just the excuse I need to go for a blat through the locale mountains next week.
