So, I suggested a wee excursion up Hall Block Road, through the windmill farm with me on the WR (still on knobblies from a visit to the farm) and him following me. This way he could get his feet wet, and I had a little backup if things got snotty.
We met up in Ballance and were soon off up the hill.
At the top of the hill, I paused to await the Jimny.
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| No sign of a little Jimny |
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| A-ha! |
You may or may not be able to tell from the above video, but damn it was windy up on the hill. You can normally blast across the tops, but I was getting blown silly. It was also a pain in the corners as I never knew which way I was going to go when coming out of a more sheltered spot and then getting slammed by the wind.
Eventually we got to the end of the gravel and the start of the dirt track/bog hole section. I stopped again for Colin (yep, another Colin!) and then with him watching tackled the first decent puddle and stalled in the middle...
Seeing how deep it was made Colin a bit nervous as the standard Jimny doesn't have a very good wading capability, (he's looking at adding snorkel and some diff breathers) so he wasn't keen to follow me. Instead, we had a bit of a wander around before I decided to go on a little bit further.
As you can see, I was able to make it around a few decent lakes (including the one I had ridden through on the way in) but chickened out on the large one. I didn't really feel like drowning the WR or myself - maybe if I'd had a different Colin with me, we might have given it a shot.
So, mission incomplete, we turned around and made our way back the way we'd come.
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| What's that in the distance? |
And I enjoyed the descent too. Watch for a bunny chase:
BTW: I played with the audio on the videos to attempt to remove the wind noise...
Back at my ute, we ignored it and popped down beside the river so that Colin could sample something with a decent power-to-weight...
Excitement over, the bike went back on the ute and it was time to cross back over the new road and head home. Quick bit of fun, but a shame we couldn't ride the whole road.
