Winter Solstice Ride 2015

Today was the shortest day of the year, so that can only mean one thing.  It is time to rally the troops and go for our annual Winter Solstice Ride.  This has been a tradition of quite a few years now.  Here are a few previous rides. 2014, 2013 and 2012.

We decided to take “Snubby” the silver sidecar for this run as she hasn’t been out since we moved to town before Christmas.  Mick had to give her a bit of a dusting down, recharge the battery and put a serious amount of air in the tyres yesterday or we wouldn’t have been going anywhere.

I think our weather this year was the best we have had for our winter ride.  It was frosty this morning, but quickly cleared into a gorgeous blue day.  Yesterday we had a pea souper fog for most of the morning, so we were rather relieved we didn’t get a repeat performance today.

As usual this was a “Mick’s Mystery Tour”.  We knew in the back of our minds we would have to get ourselves organised, but only worked out our route last night.  We did a ring around through the week and had lots of responses to the effect that “It sounds good, we’ll see how we go.  If we are there on time, great, if not don’t wait”.

To our amazement, we ended up with eleven bikes and fourteen people.  By far our biggest roll up yet.  Quite a few haven’t been on one of our rides before and we hope there will be more in the future.

Our route took us via the back roads to Mandurama, then across to Canowindra by a road we haven’t ventured on before for morning tea.

Most of us just packed a thermos and bickies.

Next we travelled through Cudal and back to Mandurama.  Next we travelled by another new road to us across to Molong for lunch.

We had a great counter meal at the Freemasons Hotel, which only reopened a few months ago after being closed for several years. It was even warm enough to sit outside in the beer garden.  No photos, as we were too busy eating and talking.

One final picture of all the group (except me – I forgot to pack the tripod) before we headed back home to the cold high country.

We had a terrific ride.  We travelled 320 kms for the day.  The weather was ideal, the roads nice and quiet, the scenery lovely – so good to see it green, and the company was good.  What more could we want.