Tuesday 28 August 2018

2018 Bottlemart Smiddy Challenge- Day 5 (Baralaba to Blackwater)

Written by Geoff Ney and Andrew Schy

Daily Stats
By David “Stinky Dave” Colahan

Distance: 180.2 kilometres
Ride Time:  7:54 hours total, 6:10 hours riding
Ave Speed:   29.2 km/hr
Elevation: 788 m climbed
Min Temperature: 4C degrees
Max Temperature: 40C degrees

The day started with a hearty breakfast from the Myella Farm Stay crew and Captain Kevvy was  getting cranky straight up because he had had nothing to be cranky about. 

The rollout was attended by the Carl, Lyn and Imogen where Imogen was given the honour of ringing the cow bell to see us on the way, Luckily enough Imogen did not bring her Joeys (the Myella Farm Stay takes care of little roos and brings them back to health) with her so we were able to get the peloton rolling without any distractions.

The morning was a brisk 4 degrees at rollout, the peloton was in high spirits,  it was Hump day after all, the weather was clear the wind was being nice to us, what was there not to like. We breezed into Baralaba and doubled the population for a brief time.  

For first timers to the Central Queensland area, they were looking for more corners in the road and the hot mix bitumen, but we are no longer in south east QLD. Killer decided that he would attempt to emulate Lil’ Geeves heroic deeds and shot off the road at high speed due to power of his snot rockets, unfortunately he was unable to execute the re-entry to the same standard.

Ken and Ben were having a relatively quiet day with 0 flat tyres for the day, which was a big turnaround from the previous four days and to stop them from being bored Coolie decided to help them out and got his protractor out and found his handle bars were out by 2 degrees.

We hit the extremely busy Cap Highway much to the disgust of a few of the road trains, quite a few choice words were thrown over the UHF, the least said the better.  With Garath back in peloton, and Kik back in the mechanic’s vehicle, Carol’s nerves were given a reprieve with all vehicles staying on the black top.

You would think that after cycling 900 odd Km over 5 days you would have lost a bit of weight, but thanks to the Road Crew and magnificent spreads they have put on for us that has not been the case. The home bake, the SAO’s for morning tea and the steak sangas for lunch, topped off by ice blocks from the Dingo Roadhouse, was a feast worthy of royalty.






We rolled into Blackwater a tad early thanks to favourable conditions and were very appreciative met by a few supporters from the local community.

The huddle today was lead today by Pottsy and Garath who was in awe of the work done by the road crew and lead the huddle to three Smmiddy cheers which reverberated of the basketball hall. Pottsy himself was dropping hints in a roundabout way that he would like to ride the challenge one day, and led the three cheers for the cyclists.


The official analysis from Cath in the Road crew, is that all the cyclists are tight arses, and there will be no fines issued for sunburn tonight.

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