T Minus 2

Thursday October 10^th

I only rode one lap today, but there were a couple of sections which were repeated a few times, notably The Luge. This was partly because it was a lot of fun but also because it is quite tricky to get right, we spent an hour or so on the one section alone. It is a drop from  a large bridge made of girders into a series of very large connected berms with a couple of jumps in the middle. The obvious line is not necessarily the fastest as there are a few braking bumps on some of the corners and these are big enough to slow you down. At the bottom is a jump off a large-ish rock. The jump itself isn’t too hard but the landing is on a narrow wooden bridge, not much margin for error.

Today’s wildlife: 2 very large lizards and some wallabies, all of them too fast for the camera. I have not yet seen any of the snakes, about which we are constantly being warned. There is one called The Brown Snake, one called The Black Snake and one called the Red Bellied Black Snake. All three are dangerous and all three have been seen on the course. Despite never having seen any of them before I am pretty confident that I could correctly identify which kind any I do see are. Aussies like to get straight to the point with the names of things, this is the country which has a large region called The Great Sandy Desert and also something called 90 Mile Beach. I’m sure you can guess what they are...