Outback Odyssey - The Lead Up

This series of posts is going to follow the journey of a recent cycling holiday I undertook with my partner and about another 130 people, the Outback Odyssey. This ride is held by Bike SA and follows the Mawson trail from Adelaide to Blinman in South Australia. It is named after the explorer, Sir Douglas Mawson, who frequented the area on field trips with geology students from the University of Adelaide. The whole trail is about 900km long however, having never undertaken any multi-day cycling tours, we decided to take the option of only doing part of the trail from Burra to Melrose.

Pitchy (left) and Contessa (right) on a another trip

The lead up to our adventure was filled with lists, deliveries and testing. The mountain bikes (my “Contessa” and my partners “Pitchy”) had been serviced and checked to within an inch of their lives. Neither myself nor my partner had done much camping and so on top of trying to figure out which tent to get we also had to test it out. A quick overnight trip to Mount Crawford with friends seemed to indicate everything was working well and so we were set.

The Outback Odyssey actually started from Adelaide on the 11th of May, though we wouldn’t be joining them until the 15th. I’m a compulsive weather watcher at the best of times and so I kept track of the weather our soon to be comrades were dealing with. The first week of the Odyssey required them to detour to avoid a bushfire and then three solid days of Mud and rain. By the time we joined them in Burra, they were a wet, muddy and bedraggled mob with a few bike issues and unfortunately a few injuries as well.

  

The Taj Mahal

It rained most of our trip to Burra, however once we arrived it stopped long enough for us to organise ourselves and put our tent up. As it turned out, our tent was somewhat larger than most and was subsequently christened the Taj Mahal. We did however, receive a few envious glances later in the trip when our dry bikes were stored neatly undercover. 

Camping CLP

Burra put on a great feast, potato and leak soup, steak and salads followed by sticky date pudding. We had our first route briefing where we discovered that there were options! Specifically there were options that involved us reducing the amount of mud we had to go through! Over dinner, we had been regaled with stories of soul sucking, derailleur destroying mud, so we were overjoyed to hear there was an option (taken up by most of the riders) to ride along the highway for a stretch to avoid it. We were also treated to a table top display of how to ascend and descend on a mountain bike, as we had been told that the serious riding began tomorrow.

With full stomachs and a bunch of nerves we retreated to the Taj for a good nights rest in preparation for our first day on the road.