Bridges, Boats, and Bicycles 27-28/08/22

Given the unlikely combination of a weekend with good weather (which in Melbourne meant not raining and with snatches of sunshine) we did something most unusual for ourselves, and went cycling.

On Saturday I took Roger out along the Djeering Trail and beside Dandenong Creek to the sea, regaling him all the while with tales of pouring rain, blistering headwinds, and hypothermia on the train. We pedaled in bright sunshine under a benevolent blue sky festooned with fluffy white clouds, and I got the distinct feeling that he didn't appreciate how cold and wet my previous Djeering Trail adventures had been.

The trail had quite a different feel when riding in the sunshine and with an engineer.

We munched our lunch in a park with a good view of the elevated railway.

We stopped and took photos (lots of photos!) of the guide posts, and one of us may have been quite critical of the excessive use of reflectors.

Not to mention the excessive use of yellow rolling things in guard rails,

and the excessive funding that resulted in highway follies such as this black bird.  Oh, the delightful horror of it all!

When we weren't looking at infrastructure we enjoyed riding along it,

and spent quite a bit of time admiring the wastewater treatment ponds, and wondering how it was that they didn't smell, and where they discharged, and generally really enjoying ourselves...

Well, one of us, anyway. 

A happy engineer with a sewage pond.

Opposite the sewage pond.

Whilst on the train to Caulfield to start Saturday's adventure, we met two Old Mates with their electric bicycles. They raved rapturous about the benefits and pleasures of electric bicycles for the chronologically challenged, and told us all about the trail they were heading out to ride: from Williamstown to Williams Landing.  Inspired, we checked out the map and on Sunday morning we jumped on the train to Williamstown for an adventure of our own. 

We started at the Point Gellibrand Coastal Heritage Park, where we found a ball drop tower just like the one at Semaphore in Adelaide, but not quite as imposing.

So we indulged in some photos.  Those aren't our bikes - they belonged to some cyclists doing a charity ride, who were also taking tower photos.  They, lucky cyclists, had gotten to ride over the Westgate Bridge as part of their ride that morning.  We were very jealous.

Right, we're heading over to the other side of the water.  Let's go!

We hopped on our bikes and pedaled briskly off, having given ourselves a deadline by promising to catch up with the BD later that day.  Our commitment to putting in a solid cycling effort lasted all of 200m and then we saw the Titanic and just had to stop for a cup of tea.

I have a sinking feeling about this.

With not an iceberg in sight and our tea all drunk, off we went again along the foreshore,

We had views of the Port and the city across the Yarra mouth.

Industry had given way to vast modern houses owned by people who have too much space and too much money to spend on... artwork? to fill that space.

Two cannons stood guard.  Why?  I don't know.  Information was sadly missing.

This is the face of an outraged engineer.  He is horrified that construction workers are commemorated by a rubbish bin.  Maybe it's a hint to construction workers?

All of that was but the prelude to the main delight of the day, and excitement built steadily in our resident engineer as we pedaled up the river toward the Westgate Bridge and settled in to wait for our turn on.... Tahdahh... The Westgate Punt!

Joy of joys! A boat ride.

It is with enormous pleasure that an engineer takes his bicycle on a boat under a bridge.

 

The Westgate Punt has run in one form or another since 1993 and is used by lots of pedestrians and cyclists to avoid having to share the Westgate Bridge with lots of traffic, or riding a big detour up the river to a cycle-friendly bridge, and back again.  For the princely sum of $5 ($2:70 during the week) we got to spend 7 minutes with a jolly punt operator and sundry other cyclists and go under the Westgate Bridge. Our engineer was practically hyperventilating with excitement and the experience went a long way toward redeeming the commemorative rubbish bin insult.

Here's the punt in action. 

Once all that excitement was over we were back on familiar territory and pedaled down the beachfront toward home. Melburnians worshiped the sun in a glorious assortment of puffer jackets, bikinis, shorts, t-shirts, sundresses, and lycra that had been laundered one too many times and lost it's opacity.  

 

We passed a crime scene on the beach, complete with loitering police, SES, News crew, voyeuristic public, and body bag. 

We sat on a hill at St Kilda to eat our lunch. Below us a traffic accident caused a traffic jam: a police car zoomed up the bicycle lane, closely followed by an ambulance. As the traffic solidified a multitude of Harley Davidsons zoomed illegally up the bicycle lane too, only to abruptly revert into law-abiding traffic-lane-using citizens when they spied the police car ahead. 

No one has crashed yet.  Traffic is flowing nicely and Harley-Davidsons are behaving.

 

In Brighton I found a bicycle service station and pumped up my tyres. You'd think I'd have learnt to keep my tyres pumped up by now but nope, some of us are slow learners I guess. 

We finished off the day watching TV with the BD, having discovered that the local Burger Road has the best BBQ chicken wings that money can buy.  

The dogs demanded a share and didn't get it.  Such is doggy life.

The engineer went to bed to dream of bridges, boats, and bicycles.