You Yang out the yin yang

So thinking today would be a good day to hurt, Joel and I made arrangements to ride out the to the YouYangs flattrack handicap today. And we thought it was a smashing idea. Right up till the alarm went off at 5.45am, after watching as much of the tour stage as I could keep my eyes open for... So that gruesome detail aside, we beeped the car horn about 14 times (annoying bipper function) to really thrill the neighbor's on a Sunday, whilst we loaded our gear to be dropped out for us, and hit the road about 6.45am.

yap, its dark at that time, even on a Sunday....

Joel was head navigator this morning, and after a few wrong turns (male pride...), we dug out the map which was hieroglphs on a scrap of work paper, in a snap lock bag, and deciphered the davinci code. Turned out we were going the right way, somehow the right way included Werribee and Altona... Go figure...?!

And like most crap towns, Werribee and its surrounds have small things that love to pierce tyres.. So with a front flat, and a bit of swearing, we stopped for all the things you do in that situation (and it started to rain- doh!) and had a feed, drink, wee, tyre change etc, before we reminded ourselves how we are pissweak cyclists and swore we had to get CO2 cartridges because pumping by hand SUCKS!


Rolling through Altona, we were briefly struck by how it could be called a kinda nice place. The moment left us as quickly as it came.... It is near water. Its Altona. We kept going. Faster. Had an amusing bloke in Werribee too, a P-plater in a Camira-an-fixit-again who jumps on the loud button from far behind up (empty 2 lane road) and then blasts it all the way past... We catch up at the lights, all puffed up (can you imagine?!) and ready to have a yarn, but as we roll up we can see from behind that he is busy digging out something from under the passenger seat... We decide maybe he's having a bad enough day already, and rather than him going all 'Falling Down' on us, we should leave him be. Freak!

Like very good mission ride, there needs to be a crap part to it, and this was it. 3 lanes of 100kph traffic, and B-doubles next to our shoulders. We probably only had 10km on it, but it was far from pleasant, not sure I'd enjoy that gay-bay-day thing?! I don't think freeways are my bag... Still, a cavalcade (what's the collective noun for Harleys?) of Harleys went through and that was a buzz- it was the simple things...!

And we actually made it to the event before the start! So with a lazy 80km or so before our race, we then discovered that the race was going to be a little longer than we thought, and a few people that *possibly* should have been off scratch, weren't. Cheeky boys..! So that was a recipe for more suffering, but that was why we did it, handicaps are rarely won by the scratchies. Fortunately, we were lucky enough to have people to bring our stuff out for us, so we could swap and go. To find out how the race went, you'll have to nip over and check the Felt Racing blog