Fifth gen adventure ride

oldboyracer · February 22, 2021

I had to go to Melbourne to pick up my I load that ended up down there, so what a better way than to jump on my trusty vfr and make a holiday out of it. Saturday dawned a bit overcast but that wasn’t going to dampen my enthusiasm. Headed out of Sydney and towards Goulburn, then to get off the main hwy turned right with no real plans of where to go other than south ,sort of. I did have 5 days to do the 1000km. Then it rained and rained did I mention it rained, my plans for a dirt run to Melbourne were washed away ( I may be silly ,but I’m not stupid)

Heading for I don’t really know where at this stage , Boorowa appeared on a road sign , sounds good for breakfast. The clouds disappeared along with a large feed of bacon and eggs , let’s go. Wee jasper sounds nice . Beautifully winding roads to wee jasper and about 10 km of dirt.
Camped at wee jasper for the night ,looked at the map and decided to tackle the 65 km of dirt to TUMUT. What a nice scenic road , a bit cut up to start with ,then widens out into a typical country road . The vfr even with its load handled it with ease , I do have suspension built by Jamie , so I’m sure that helps. These bikes just give you so much confidence in there ability to shrug off everything you throw at them.

Spent the night at Jindabyne after an awesome run through the snowy mountains. Now onto The Barry Way , this road gets you through the mountains with fantastic scenery and steep drops on one side and rock walls on the other for part of it , and only 100 km of dirt , some of it single lane. I recommend doing this ride , it’s not wilderness ,when I stopped to take a photo a Toyota Corolla drove by lol ( and I thought I was playing adventure bike).

When I arrived in Melbourne the van wasn’t ready , devastated I headed into the Dandenong ranges for brisk run through the mountain roads . The locals told me about a camping spot which worked out fine. Next morning at a local cafe for breakfast 4 hwy patrol officers in two unmarked cars pulled in, I casually asked them where I should ride ,their response took me a bit by surprise “ don’t head down that way , we patrol that road ,you are better off going over that way “ . What I nice bunch. I followed the advice and had a great ride with the road to myself .
Unfortunately the van was ready , time to go home . Loading the bike in the back of the van didn’t require the fairings to be removed , but it’s tight so to avoid damage I take them off. I very boring run home down the hwy , beating the corona lockdown by 12 hours . A quick hose off and put back together and I’m ready for the next adventure .

Excitedly I went to go through my awesome pics of the trip , not to be , the sad card in my phone corrupted so I lost all but a few pics , the great news , I will have to do it again .
I made a small video of the dirt sections , I added a link to YouTube. There my be a bit of swearing in the video ,be warned . If I’m not allowed please delete mods.