A Club Ride to Tasmania?

This is the place where it's so wet the moss climbs the tree trunks almost to the leaves, where the locals reckon summer starts on Jan 6 and ends on Jan 7?!!

Don't get me wrong - I love the apple isle. I've bushwalked the main tracks umpteen times. Started the Overland track in 30 degree heat and finished it in sleet, hail and snow. Hitched around the Island in my 20s, eating affordable cray, and um, sampling things you smoke in roll-your-owns that did not consist of tobacco.

OK, the Club has done this before, and the Club leadership are not dummies, just crazy, so why not? A place was available, cos someone dropped out and Lyn didn't think leaving the house open with buckets of food for the mutt would wash over a week. So I'm last one in.

Daytime ferry trip over - Bass Straight is like the proverbial baby's bum. Getting off at Burnie takes some time, but finally Enzo and I bed down in our twin room at the Somerset motel.

So what out of that mass of sights, sounds, gut clenchers, amazing rides (and raves afterwards) could I possibly write about for people who weren't there? Well, certainly not places, dates, routes - this is not a record, this is gonzo journalism (vale Hunter S. Thompson) or it would be if I had been stoned, drunk and mad for the whole time. As it was, I did do mad fairly often and did do drunk after the ride once or twice (remember those double Dimples Paul? - and I'm not meaning that smile of yours!)

Mad – scraping the pegs at high speed on THE BIG DAY – North West to South East in one day. And seriously mad was trying to ride fast out of Queenstown. I’d been warned about the decreasing radius turn. Yep, found it – ran a bit wide but no dramas.

Oooh noo, when I really found it I ended up closely inspecting the shoulder of the wrong side of the road before hauling the TDM away from catastrophe. He he, blush, well off an up. No harm done; nothing coming down the other way to turn ‘positional embarrassment’ into serious cock-up. Just a gentle observation from Cliff at the next stop about my choice of line.

Or, having clipped corners and coming real close to the roadside posts, no drama, just a game really. Only when Cliff and I stopped to mark the turn off to Bothwell, and gave a post a kick, the bleddy thing was steel! Looked like the local plastic but was a bit less bendy. Soooo, a bit more respect was called for.

But you can’t do all these gorgeous roads without picking up a bit of speed and confidence. And this really started to happen on the last couple of days. Heading into blind turns fast, without dithering, knowing that I could probably cope changing line to miss some possum slime, or best of all, around Scottsdale, hammering through the sight lines with Peter F. under a bright blue sky, with something a lot better than Hunter S’s shit running through the veins. Just magic.

Ern Reeders (Yamaha TDM 850)