City ride

After my shorter than expected ride down the Cooks River/drain the other day, I thought I would head east and see how far that took me. I know that if I go east far enough, I will hit the ocean, and that will be it, but I knew that I would be turning around well before I could smell the salt.

I took a bit of a detour to see how our latest bike path extension is going. The fences are still up, but the line marking has been done - which is usually a waste of time around here, since most pedestrians are incapable of comprehending that a symbol of a pedestrian means that they walk over there, and a symbol of a bike means that we ride over here. I have no idea how they tackle complex tasks such as doing the laundry. I bet they are all walking around in shrunken shirts that they mistakenly washed in hot water, or pink shorts because they mixed reds and whites in the same load.


The fence to keep idiot boy racers from jumping the kerb and taking out cyclists is also in place. I guess the next step is to put a fence on the other side, to stop idiots who are walking and talking on their phone at the same time from walking over the edge and ending up in the water 30 feet below.


A fish needs a bicycle like a.... how does that go? In this case, a fisherman does need a bicycle. This bloke had broken his rods down and had them attached to the top bar of his bike frame. I followed him for a while, and as he did not stink of fish, I think he was on his way to his favourite spot, rather than returning.


HMAS Adelaide sits forlornly at the dock, having been decommissioned just over a year ago.
She's going to be sunk as a reef at Terrigal in October 2009.


I had this odd notion of riding up the King St cycle path, which I thought might have been finished by now.

Nope. It's that mess of traffic barriers on the left of the photo.


Note the chick on the bike on the left. She too seemed to be thinking of going up the non-existant cyclepath, and when she found it had ceased to be, she thought about riding up the road with all the fast moving cars.


Ah, that was a silly idea, wasn't it. After cursing the traffic for a minute, she hopped off and pushed her bike up the footpath. I gave a disgusted grunt at this point and did a U-turn. I could have gone left, and over the Harbour Bridge, but I was not in the mood after seeing this mess. It's been like this for months. How freaking long does it take to build a path capable of carrying pushbikes?


Pretty flags at Darling Harbour. Something about living life.


Another view of HMAS Adelaide. See the sign there? "Beware of the crane". What crane? This wharf used to extend all the way up to near where the Anzac Bridge is now, but it was chopped off when a housing development went up last year. The crane probably went with it. All that is left is this rather mangled and faded sign of what was once here.


Big, salty, chocolate balls. These bouys are huge - if I stood next to one and stretched my arms up, they would not reach the top.


So there you have it. 40km in the hot sun (temp around 31 degrees).