Day 2: Kyogle - Rathdowney - Canungra - Murwillumbah - Nimbin - Kyogle
3 October 2014
Master Map
Given that the Lions TT was not due to be run until Saturday and Sunday, and Day 2 was Friday, it is not now clear to me why we had chosen to arrive on Thursday evening. Because we could? To get a good camp site? Who knows?
Anyway, there we were with a day to kill, glorious weather and excellent motorbikes to ride. My original suggestion had been that we ride a loop from Kyogle south to Grafton; west up the Gwydir Highway to Glen Innes; along the New England Highway to Tenterfield and then east along the Bruxner Highway to Casino and back to Kyogle. In the light of the day, the 7 hours of riding involved seemed a bit hard so we settled on riding the Mt Lindesay Highway to Rathdowney and then seeing where it took us. We decided to avoid the Lions Road lest it be filled with enthusiasts practising their weekend moves.
We set off westward and were enjoying the ride when we rounded a corner and found people fighting a grass fire on the roadside. We stopped to help finish putting it out. The people who owned the property were both 86 and were glad of the help, I think. A chap we'd met the night before was there helping. He had a Kawasaki 1400GTR with the most amazing collection of electronic mods I've seen. There was an additional switch board on the bars that controlled God-knows what from radios to modulated lights to other devices that he chose not to explain.
We had a great ride along an excellent stretch of the Summerland Way and the Mt Lindesay Highway on which we were to spend a bit of time over the coming days. At Rathdowney, where we met Enzo on an earlier ride, we ate a belated and pedestrian breakfast of eggs and bacon.
We decided to head north and then east so I could show Tony the Nerang-Murwillumbah-Kyogle road I'd ridden the day before.
The stretch from Rathdowney to Beaudesert is straight and fast and not all that interesting, but the road improves on the way to Canungra. Some of it, even though it's essentially a busy commuter route is quite spectacular, particularly the stretch from Canungra to the Nerang-Murwillumbah Road.
I'm not a particularly fast rider and posted speed limits are generally OK for my style of riding. I generally don't have a problem with them. Except … the Nerang-Murwillumbah Road from where we joined it to the border of NSW which has a ridiculous limit of 80 kph. While, in a car, it would be hard to drive it at a greater speed and—for me at least—most of the corners have to be taken slightly more slowly, most of the road is high quality and sticking to the limit makes overtaking impossible in the couple of places where you can. Nevertheless, it's a great road even though the surface and quality deteriorates towards the border. The surface is worse on the NSW side of the border but it's still heaps of fun and the views towards the coast and of the border ranges are magnificent.
The road from Murwillumbah to Kyogle was better on the second day. For the hell of it we took a detour through Nimbin, a town living on the memory of a music festival in the 1970s. The roads leading to it are a motorcyclist's delight and we enjoyed them. Lots. We stopped in Nimbin for coffee before heading back to Kyogle for beer and a good meal in the local Chinese Restaurant.
Some photos of the post breakfast ride.
