This website documents our bicycle ride around Australia. Our plan is to travel in an anticlockwise direction, sticking to the coast as much as possible and to visit every state and capital along the way. It will be an unsupported ride with us carrying everything we need on our bikes.
We do not wish to rush and will take our time to soak up as much as possible. We aim to take a casual ten months to complete the trip.(Update - As our journey has progressed we have decided to take an additional 2 months returning home approximately 12 months after we left).

Our About page includes all the background information about the ride and all the answers you may be looking for about "Sprung Chickens".

Our latest report will always appear below before being archived with previous reports that can be retrieved from our Daily Reports page.

Expedition Update

Day 314, Saturday, 6 February, 2010 - Day 315, Sunday, 7 February, 2010

Hobart

We spent Saturday in the centre of Hobart, at Salamanca Markets and walking along the waterfront. One of our quests was to find the Church of St Joseph where Denise’s Great Great Great Grandparents were married on 27 August, 1855.

When we arrived in Tasmania our intention was to ride to the top of the 1270m Mt Wellington, which is the dramatic backdrop to Hobart. When we have been to Hobart previously it has always been in cloud and when we rode in on Friday it was also covered, making us think that our intentions to go up would be thwarted again. However, as we visited the markets today we noted that the skies above Mt Wellington were clear and that maybe we may be able to get a good view from the summit on this trip. But our experiences with the traffic yesterday made us a little unsure of riding.

So we piked out and hired a car on Sunday. Our excuse was that with a car we could drive down to Kingston, Kettering, Cygnet and Huonville as well as up Mt Wellington. In the morning Mt Wellington was covered in cloud so we left going up it until later in the day when it was clear. Rising 1270 metres above sea level (and the sea being only a few kilometres away), the view from the top of Mt Wellington was spectacular and well worth the trip. The drop off is dramatic. There were a few cyclists riding up the mountain and the one who descended several cars behind us kept up all the way back into the city. An exhilarating 23km downhill run falling 1200m that we missed out on.

Our last sightseeing stop for the day was the Botanic Gardens where we were interested to see “Pete’s Vege Patch”. On all the ABC Gardening shows they never show how they water the vege patch so we were keen to research this aspect ourselves.

Zoom into the map and use the 'Satellite' layer to see our new location.

Hobart and Mt Wellington as seen from the east bank of the Derwent River

The Tasman Bridge

Salamanca Markets

Salamanca Markets

Church of St Joseph

Historic Hunter Street next to Victoria Dock

Hobart and the Derwent as seen from the top of Mt Wellington

Historic Friends Cottage at the Royal Tasmanian Botantic Gardens

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