Beautiful Day for a Ride

We rode early today and what a bonus that was; it was perfect bike riding weather. The air was crisp and cool and no sign of a headwind (which I'm always very thankful for)! We only did 30km. With the ride only 1 week away we didn't want to overdo it. The bikes were serviced during the week.

We have had a look at the road profile; Gibbo is excited devestated to see that the total distance is actually 220km, not 200km. He's not sure how he'll go - he hasn't trained for the extra 20 (nor the first 200 either actually). In fact, he reckons he's been tapering for the last 3 months.

I worked yesterday; this week has been huge with the extra hours needed to get ready for our regional meeting at Windorah on top of the already heavy admin workload; I clocked up 75 hours which is just ridiculous and certainly not sustainable; 12 and 15 hour days and I still brought some work home to do at night.

Today we trimmed the bums on the silkies and split them into their breeding groups. I'm especially looking forward to seeing what comes out of the black cockerel/silver hen grouping. I hope I have better success this year than last when the carpet snake ate everything in sight.

The local fox population is starting to become a bit braver and more of a problem now that Poofy isn't here to keep them at bay. This morning at 6.30 one of the little game roosters was taken from my compound which isn't far from the house and there's been evidence of fox activity during the week. Poofy used to do a sweep of the cattle yards/shed/house/my chook area early every morning but since he's been gone the foxes have come in a lot closer. Gibbo's compound is about 500 metres from the house beside a little forest and the foxes tended to hang about up there, never really venturing down this way.

We leave here early tomorrow and meet the plane in town then head to Surat and Emerald to do a milk run pickup of other managers then head to the property just near Windorah. We've got a full program through to Wednesday then do the return milk run drop off journey on Thursday. Friday we head to Brisbane in time to drop off our bikes and bags at the Uni. We stay in the city then need to be back at the Uni by 5.30am Saturday ready to start with breakfast and the opening ceremony! 110km to Wivenhoe Dam, camp the night, then 110km back again - and rain is predicted. For once I hope they're wrong! I don't really relish riding all that way in the rain and camping in wet conditions but I'm quite looking forward to the challenge and to doing something hard and being exhausted but happy to have made it to the end.