Lady on Motorbike

More mountain roads, gorgeous seaside towns and the promise of platypuses (or is that platypi?) was the story of today.

We awoke to our weather apps telling us it was a chilly 6 degree outside but the morning sunshine soon brought that up to a more bearable 12 degrees.

Leaving lovely Braidwood, we took the Kings Highway towards Batemans Bay on the coast. Yet another gem of a road, its perfect surfaces and lazy bends were only broken up by a stretch of road under repair aka ‘gravel’. Typical! All good though.

Swooping down into Batemans Bay, we filled with fuel and started a glorious ride along the coast. The road meanders through coastal towns and, on a perfect clear day as it was today, it’s just gorgeous.

We stop briefly at Bodalla for a taste of its cheese (just ok) and for Gary to say hello to the alpacas.

Seriously, they’re like the cute hybrid offspring of a sheep and a giraffe.

Through Narooma we rode, flanked by water from the ocean and the rivers lagoons and lakes surrounding the town.

We turned off the Princes Highway towards the coast just past Tilba Tilba and discovered another wonderful road of sweeping curves and wonderful water views punctuated by wooden bridges.

The end of our detour was the coastal town of Bermagui, a remote seaside town packed with tourists for the long weekend.

Back to the highway, through Bega and onto the Snowy Mountains Highway through rolling green hills and countryside that reminded me of England.

We spotted rain ahead of us so prepared a little. I mounted my new handbar muffs – oh yes, you can buy muffs for motorbike handlebars! Most exciting! Not only do they keep a rider’s hands dry in rain but they are quite snugly too, perfect for this temperature sensitive Ladyonmotorbike.

This is not the greatest pic (I forgot to take a specific pic). It they can just be seen in this one:

Brown Mountain was our next treat of the day – Gary has read and told me several times that this road used to be known as ‘Brown Underpants Mountain’ due to it being quite hairy in its early days but it was fine today. Except if you were driving a caravan and it breaks down on a tight corner – which happened today, that wouldn’t have been any fun for them.

We stopped at a look out and had some snacks. Several helpful people told us how it was a little soggy up ahead. We copped a light sprinkle of rain on the way up the mountain but it soon stopped and we had dry conditions the rest of the way.

We turned off the Snowy Mountains Highway onto the Monaro Highway, at the top of Brown Underpants Mountain and headed towards Bombala along a lovely smooth road with sweeping curves and plenty of visibility.

We arrived at Bombala around 3.15. Deciding it was a little early to finish up for the day, we continued on to Delegate (odd name, IMHO). Another stretch of smooth road took us to this tiny town where we turned around. Delegate is tiny, it has a pub but that was about it. Gary described it as a one horse town and the horse has run away. To Bombala probably, which was confirmed as we returned to Bombala to see two horses. Honestly!

Bombala greeted us with open arms, as can be seen by the sign above. We checked into our motel and went for a wander with promises of platypus in the nearby river. We didn’t seen any, don’t you just hate it when wildlife don’t perform as required!

Tomorrow’s plan (so far) is to head down the Imlay Road to the coast, and back and then south to Cann River in Victoria on the Monaro Highway and back. That would bring us back to Bombala tomorrow but, mindful of not leaving to great a distance to get home on Tuesday, Canberra is looking like an option for overnighting. We like Canberra, it’s fun, with no wildlife to let you down – it just has politicians that do that 😜.