Chapter Two
The Band
Day 4: Moruya to Cooma
9 February 2024
Master Map
My wife and I had a great time with our friends and a bit of a look around the lovely part of Australia in which they've chosen to live — on the coast with good swimming and surfing as well as fertile land and mountains to the west. Adjacent to some great motorcycle country!
Somewhere on the way south the visor of my helmet had broken. The right-hand side lugs holding it to the helmet had snapped off. It kinda worked until I turned my head to the right and it would pop out. I could see it popping out so exuberantly that it would snap the other side. I'd had the helmet since 2016 when its predecessor blew off a guidepost on top of a mountain in Tasmania and was damaged. It was a good 7 years old and everyone I talked to told me it was due for replacement. I didn't want to do it, but I couldn't source a replacement visor anywhere. Nowra, a couple of hours to the north up the main coast road offered an opportunity. It's also an easy ride to Braidwood where Pterodactyl and I planned to meet at the end of the day.
There's nothing wrong with riding to Nowra up this bit of the coast road
The helmet was duly replaced with a flash new Shark Carbon Spartan.
New Lid
I went across the road for a cup of coffee. There I met a bloke who had just bought a Honda CBX and was fuming at the difficulty of transferring the registration. I think he'd made a mistake on the hand-written form which meant he had to do the thing all over again. It's the sort of rank stupidity that rightly gives bureaucracy a bad name.
This guy (obscured) was really friendly. He wasn't riding the CBX. His was the Suzuki next to it. As I didn't ask whether I could take or publish his picture so I've wiped him out. So to speak.
To stay on sealed road, I had to make another detour past Tarago and the Loaded Dog. Somewhere around there, it became clear Pterodactyl had left Sydney a day early and was heading for Cooma. I called him and we agreed I'd head for Cooma and he'd ride out to meet me.
Nothing wrong with the road to Tarago and Braidwood either
There's a pretty and direct road to Cooma from Braidwood. It has gravel sections. I remembered them as not being too long and in good condition when I rode them with Pterodactyl and NoRoomtoMove. We stopped in a very pretty bush camping area for a cup of tea.
WRONG!! The gravel section was longer I recalled and the weather had played havoc with the surface in the intervening years. The sealed bits at either end were fast and lots of fun; the gravel was slow and rattled the fillings in my teeth. Google Maps told Pterodactyl a section of the road at his end was closed (it wasn't) and led him a merry dance. We finally met up in Cooma and checked into the Alpine Hotel.
The sealed bits of the Braidwood Cooma Road were just fantastic; an antidote to boredom …
… but much of this gravelly stuff was not much fun at all. To be fair it was prettier than the alternative route.
Participants in the Rally Down Under stayed here in 2017. In those heady days, Pterodactyl and I used to enjoy a beer or two followed by a glass or two of fine red wine followed by increasingly animated discussions. I'm not sure they were always fun for spectators. These days, we're both considerably more subdued.
Two members of the band were together.
