252 to Mittagong 29.3.2019

Hugh got up early to build a shed for the sheep and went there at 6:30 when it still was dark. The kids appeared one after the other, Dimity made breakfast, we had a big photo-shooting in the garden and then I left.

On the road to Goulburn, we saw each other again 40 or 50 min later, because they had the same way to school and work, but when we said “Auf Wiedersehen” and good-bye we didn’t mean that, but hopefully once in Austria. Or Uganda??

In Goulburn I changed from the nice country road to the Hume highway which is more direct, with less – but still enough! – climbs and of course more traffic and noise. For a while, I could see signs for bicycles, e.g. for crossing when there was an exit or for narrow bridges, but then there were no signs anymore. And later I noticed that the highway now was called motorway. I had not seen any sign that forbid bicycles, but at least I now understood, why Mr.G wanted to leave the motorway and go somewhere else. I wanted to continue to a service station at km 118 (of my tour) but then I saw a sign for a caravan park earlier and took that exit. Mr.G was happy, and I was ok with it, because I had done more than half of the 200km to Leumeah. Later, I tried to find out if the motorway is open or not for cyclists, but it still was not clear. But google maps takes this route (komoot not) and it is 60 instead of 72km and only 210m uphill instead of 430m. I is hard to decide, maybe the weather conditions will give an answer, because it is one hour less riding, but for sure less beautiful.

This time there was no need to go to a bathroom for charging my stuff, I had been sitting in the kitchen of the camping place and my phone even had enough internet for a hotspot, so I could upload something.
Then came a couple with a friend who had 69^th birthday and they sat down with two bottles of wine. Soon their voices became louder and maybe their pronunciation changed, too, but they were hard to understand for me anyway. They fried some sausages and invited me to their table. The pan was loaded with 12 big and fat sausages and during this meeting I got 4 of them. I had been eating my own “dinner” before and was not hungry but still it was no problem to eat them, including some toast bread. The only thing that I could not do like my hosts was putting butter between bread and sliced sausages, what seemed too fat even for me.
The conversation was not easy, but I am sure if they would not have been a bit drunk and if I would have had less problems with the Australian accent, it would have been interesting enough.