Red Hill round-up

This weekend I shook things up a bit, I took a non-solo cycle in two parts.

The ride started out with the tall man and myself pedalling our way cheerfully along to the Red Hill lookout.  It's a big hill in an inner southern suburb of Canberra.

Red Hill is a great way for Black Mountain aspirants to cut their teeth before tackling the real bad-boy of hills in Canberra.  The corners are gentler, the road is less steep, wider and with better visability (less trees obscuring corners)  The view from the lookout is great, and totally worth the ride.

I needed a rest part way up to catch my breath and give my legs a break, but found the ride much easier with a bit of a rest.  I guess there's nothing wrong with just hopping off the bike for a minute when it all gets a bit too much.

I was happily rewarded at the top of the ride, with a large red-setter dog complete with cheerful owner.  The dog loved pats, and happily submitted to my ear-squiggling, chin-rubbing confirmation of the dog's general "goodness". 

The only thing better than patting a big friendly dog is riding a bike downhill.  We can all guess what happened next, the downhill is lovely, shallow enough for those new to downhills to apply brakes and take at a more comfortable pace, but steep enough for the adrenaline junkies to tuck their torso's down to the bike, their tails in the air, and absolutely flog it.  A word of caution though, there's no footpath up Red Hill, and there seem to be quite a few pedestrians traipsing up, down, and across the road all quite near blind corners. 

Upon reaching the bottom of the hill (and again a safety note, the bottom of the hill terminates in a roundabout intersection, so you will need to wash off some speed before you start mixing it up with the urban traffic)  we headed in towards Civic via old parliament house.  It was a real treat to be pedalling along under the tall man's navigation, I just rolled along enjoying the view.  The first portion of the ride concluded at a pub in town, where we met some friends and enjoyed a well-earned frosty cold drink.

By the time it came to ride home the sky had clouded over somewhat, and darkened considerably.  The cycle home was taken mainly off roads, and along one of canberra's many cycleways; which I confess are still an arcane squiggle of paths not necessarily leading anywhere useful for me.  Once again, tall man was at the ready with knowledge of how to get where we needed to go.  Most excellent.

We started at LBG, went westerly, around the dam and then along the Cotter sort of area.  There's lots of construction going on there, with new wections of bike track, and modifications to existing sections.  I learned that canberra's bike tracks are fantastic, if you can bloody work out where you're going.  If I hadn't had a navigator to follow, there were several points where taking a reasonably logical guess as to where I needed to turn off would have lead me somewhere quite different to my destination.  The bike tracks are a great option for those who don't want to take to the bike lanes and share with the car traffic, but definately attend armed with a map, or a navigator.

Thanks for the ride tall man :-)