Yesterday was Australia Day, a public holiday, so myself and Kevin headed off to the Blue Mountains to do a bit of mountain biking. We decided en-route to have a go at the Linden Ridge trail which turned out to be an inspired choice. After a few kms of fire trail we found the start of the singletrack section off to the side. It was a little overgrown, so we were getting scratched and scraped by bushes & small tree branches as we travelled along, crashing through plenty of spider webs (we took turns leading). The terrain was quite varied, alternating between rocky, sandy and leafy, with plenty of puddles from the rain that morning which kept things interesting and fairly challenging. 6.5kms later we got to the end – no expansive views or anything special, just the trail petering out, so we turned around and came back. The return journey seemed quicker, maybe because we knew what to expect and just balsted through most of the puddles as we now knew how deep they were.

On returning to the firetrail we decided to keep going for a few more kms until we found another, shorter, section of singletrack, approximately 1.5km long. Did that too, then decided to turn for home. There was a little more firetrail to go, but it was downhill to a turnaround (with nothing spectacular to see there) and since we’d been riding for almost 3 hours at this stage and were both getting a bit tired, we decided we couldn’t be bothered adding any more climbing to the route. The return journey wasn’t as uphill as we thought it would be, but there were still a couple of big hills which we had to struggle up. By the end we were both exhausted and commented that perhaps we should have turned around a little sooner!

All up it was bloody good fun. After a pint and some wedges we headed home and had an Australia Day barbie at mine with Niall & Mayra. We’de pretty much finished eating before we realised we hadn’t had any lamb so we rectified that by throwing on a few chops. It wouldn’t do to be UnAustralian!

Woke up this morning with scratches & scrapes, a bruised hip from falling over while clipped in on a tricky rocky bit and a nice sunburnt neck. I was also totally exhausted – maybe the beer, wine, wedges & bbq meat was less than optimal refueling nutrition ;-)

The ride is definitely one we’ll do again with the rest of the guys, though maybe with long sleeve shirts!

S: 2600m – B: 29.8km – 2 * core