Around the bay in 7 hours 30 minutes

Yesterday was the last in my trilogy of stupid events, a 210km bike ride from Glen Huntly to Glen Huntly around Port Philip Bay. It started well when the phone I was using to wake me up (borrowed from work) hadn't been updated for daylight savings. Fortunately Eleri's backup alarm woke me up at 4:45 and so I was able to get away at 5:30 after a quick breakfast and lots of grumbling.

The ride into town was great and the road was clear until we got near to Port Melbourne where I joined a swarm of other riders and we slowly headed up to the bridge. From there it was a nice little ride down to Queenscliff and onto the ferry (eventually) during which time I learnt a little about cycling etiquette and indicating. The 3 things I learnt on the ride were:

• Stopping/slowing - shouted and sometimes accompanied with a hand up showing that the group is stopping
• Finger pointing at ground - look at that lovely bit of ripped up tyre on the ground
• Finger pointed around back/to side - I'm moving out, wanting to move out, please don't crash into me

Once I'd mastered the requisite skills for riding in a group and combined them with keeping my eyes open and spotting a few obvious things before the pack got twitchy then I moved up from the back to second/third in the group and led a few times. It was very interesting and fortunately the groups were travelling at a speed that I could keep up with.

After the ferry ride I started up again and it very soon started to rain a bit which made the white lines nice and skiddy. I pottered on along the coast and up the hill and along the coast and along the coast and made it home in 7 hours and 30 minutes (ride time) and 9 hours 15 minutes (elapsed time). I stopped twice, once for the ferry and once at Mordialloc and am even thinking about riding to work tomorrow if I can sit down by then ;-)