You may have intuited from the odd subtle reference herein that I do rather like to head out on a bicycle now and then, to explore the countryside hereabouts, air out the lungs, and best of all, give the psyche a good rev.

Most of these expeditions are uneventful, which is a good thing when you’re an ageing gentleman aboard a skimpy conveyance of steel and/or carbon fibre. When you’re hitting mind-bending speeds of, oh, 50kph or so, clad in lycra with a polystyrene bowl on your head, you don’t want to be making headlines. Those could really only be the bad sort.

Today, however, the adventures along the way merited something of a post here, I thought, and so I set out to capture the memories while they were still fresh.

So around 8:30 am today (give me a break — it’s Sunday), the prospect of a ride wasn’t entirely inviting. A brisk, gusty wind was blowing out of the north-west; although the sun was shining brightly, the air temp was a chilly 10C. And the Bureau of Meteorology (known across this great nation as the BOM) as ever lied about the strength of the wind: officially it was about 18 kph, but let me assure you it was much stronger than that — and gusting to about 60 kph in my expert opinion.

So this was not a morning for smashing Strava segments. But as we know, the way to handle adverse conditions is to embrace them — or lean in, in the popular phrase.

That worked pretty well. The early leg of the ride was up the same dirt road that skirts the side of Gillamatong and hosts some of Archie’s favourite walkies, some of my more painful runs, and the odd lightning chase. And what’s good about the 100m of climbing is that you then get to fang it down the other side, which is super fun.

Today, as we were approaching warp speed on this exhilarating downhill, I spotted a small bird sitting on the road. It was a Noisy Miner (Manorina melanocephala), so named because it ‘mines’ the nectar out of flowers — it’s not a misspelling of Mynah. These are common in this sunkissed land, regarded as pests in urban environments as they drive other birds away and are known to swoop on any encroachers on their turf.

They are a familiar sight along this route too, although not usually sitting somewhat cluelessly on the common highway. But this individual was a bit small and weedy — a juvenile, I surmised as the distance closed rapidly. Predictably, junior took off on perceiving my rapid approach. Then, unpredictably, it changed direction — and flew back into the line of fire, so to speak. There was no time for either of us to react: I felt a soft thump on my right shin and knew I had experienced my first bike-borne birdstrike!

You will be pleased to know that despite this potentially catastrophic event — which could bring down a jumbo jet, after all — did not deflect me from my allotted course. Of the bird, I have no news — there was no sign of it on my return. I suspect that like me, it survived the encounter. Let’s chalk that up as a miner incident, shall we?

Anyway, down the other side of the hill you pass a couple of farms and cross a little creek, and you’re into a kind of badlands area that was burnt in the Black Summer fires of 2020 and heavily logged thereafter. It’s not pretty. The surface ranges from river sand to hard-baked clayey ruts, with large patches of loose stones, scrub and grass. It’s rocky, rolling and dried to a crisp — the Keith Richards of riding, I’d say.

Kangaroos abound (thank you thank you) — generally you’ll see a couple of dozen of them bouncing hither or, on occasion, thither. Today was no exception: I spotted one lot heading away toward the Shoalhaven River half a k down the valley, and then another bunch making tracks away from me toward the south. Even after nearly four years in this country, it’s still quite fascinating to see them cruising in easy leaps through the bush.

But then, hammering back down a very lumpy fire road, focusing very much on not falling off (it would take a long time for help to arrive if that happened), I swept round a bend and surprised a roo momma and her joey. There followed no cruisy leaping: they panicked; she fell over in a cloud of dust and gangly limbs, then soared over the barbed-wire fence alongside the track.

Joey was less fortunate: too small to leap the fence, in her distress she threw herself repeatedly into the wire. I screeched to a halt, hoping that by waiting I could calm her. But this didn’t work: the jumps into the twanging wire continued — I could only imagine the cuts the rough barbs were inflicting. So I moved slowly forward, in effect driving the little animal further down the fence until she found a gate to slip under and disappeared into the bush. Poor beast: good at hopping, quite cute, but definitely not smart.

Reascending the rear flank of Gillamatong was reasonably easy with that gale mostly behind; stopped at the top, I had the privilege of seeing an echidna busily waddling across the path and clumsily negotiating the scrub on the verge.

Note to self: don’t run into an echidna. That would not be good for the tyres — let alone the spiny monotreme. I mean, cycling is supposed to be environmentally friendly. You can’t have middle-aged men in lycra (MAMLs) cutting a swathe through the local fauna.

And with that, my two wheels took me home without further incident. That really was enough for one day.