A noisy night. Around midnight the hoons retired for the evening but then the general background hum of machinery with a bit of surf added in seemed worse than previous nights. Maybe the wind direction?
A slowish start.
Colin packed up his gear and readied it to load his trike. Jeanette was coming after lunch to pick him up – they work Wednesdays. While he gathered his things together and dried the dew off the flysheet, I took a short ride across the grass down to the nearest beach. I had checked before – there didn’t seem to any tyre piercing Bindies in the grass.
The weather report wasn’t too good, predicting rain after 2pm. We shall see.
We headed into Devonport, first stopping at the Danish coffee place we found yesterday.
Then we explored the trail running from under the Bass highway towards Spreyton. It didn’t go far, stopping at the Mini Golf, so we returned to actually cross the Mersey.
The shared path on the west side climbs easily onto the bridge. At the far end it is another story though. There are a couple of very sharp zig zag turns to negotiate, the first of which is a 7, 8 or 9 point turn.
Coming off the bridge access path we were able to run along the footpath towards Ambleside. Some parts of the path were very bumpy with deep dips where the driveways ran off the road. There is a cycle lane on the other side of the road but the lane is also used for parking cars so riding it is tricky.
Halfway to the start of the new shared path to Latrobe the Council has upgraded the footpath to shared path standard. Nice and wide and the bumps ironed out. The new shared path still runs as good as new. Interestingly the surface of the renovated pathway and the shared path is very white concrete which is very, very bright in sunlight. I will probably get sunburnt from the reflected rays!!
After an enjoyable run along the shared path, we pulled up in the Latrobe river park. There Colin decided to head off to Port Sorell, visit his daughter and wait for Jeanette there. I took one look at the gathering cloud and headed back to The Bluff returning pretty much the way we came – except I used the access path on the east side of the bridge over the Mersey to avoid the zigzags.
When I got to the CBD roadworks I just stayed on the road holding up traffic for a few minutes – much easier (for me) than fiddling about swapping footpaths / crossing the road etc.
Early this morning, as we were getting ready to go, Colin pointed out a Hot Rod driving up to the lighthouse. A couple more were seen during today’s ride. I am guessing there is a Hot Rod Rally happening somewhere. (More about this tomorrow)
By 3pm it was raining. Raining really hard. Maybe you can see in the picture through the fly screen that the ground all around was topped with flowing water. It was very noisy in the tent but no water entered – except through the slot for the power cord. The flysheet did a good job keeping the worst away from the back and sides while I lowered the front awning enough so I could cook under it while it kept the rain off the front.
In our evening phone call Sue told me the weather radar showed a cloud system centred over – guess where – Devonport!
I settled down and read a book with the background noise of rain hammering on the tent roof and hoons out to play on the wet roads. By the time I finished the Sci-fi novella the rain had stopped.
Ah. No it hadn’t, it was by then a light rain and I couldn’t hear it landing on the tent. Heavy rain returned and I turned in for the night listening to drumming on canvas.
Here is a video of cycling the Latrobe shared path :
Tony's Tasmanian Cycling Blog 
Great videos, music too, the cycle ways are on the Northwest Coast, brilliant.
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as usual excellent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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