Day 33 - Lithgow to Braidwood - 354kms

Today was a bit of a struggle for us. It started out nicely with some light rain and tight twisty corners down to Jenolan Caves. The caves exceeded our expectations with the road actually passing through a portion of the cave and out to an old hotel on the other side. We parked, walked around the caves and enjoyed some of the best weather of the day. The paved road out of the caves was very tight, very steep, slightly wet, and perfect for breaking the back end loose coming out of corners. Having a 90% bald tire helped and I think it was about 95% bald by the top of the mountain.

This is where the day took a turn for the worse. We were heading down a dirt road on the edge of the Blue Mountains as the rain got heavier and the turn we were expecting never came. I was looking at my phone wishing I had reception to pull up a better map when my low fuel light came on. I thought back to our dark cold ride into Lithgow the previous night and remember thinking "I'll just fill up in the morning. I'm too damn cold right now." Crap, I had forgotten to fill up this morning. We looked at our options and decided to take the safe route and backtrack to Oberon. We filled up and headed south for the second time when a storm hit us with rain, cold air and high winds which didn't let up. Now normally I trust my Garmin GPS but what it did to us today was unforgivable. It lead us down a logging road in the middle of nowhere and turned us down an ominous looking road. It was raining too heavy to read the signs and we continued until we found ourselves at the gate of a prison. With barb wire, armed guards and rain in our face we turned around and headed back down the nearest paved road. Next we arrived at a sign that warned of the hazards of continuing. The sign recommended extra water, fuel, tires, medical supplies, satellite phone, etc.. I thought deeply and came to the conclusion that this trail probably didn't lead us to where we wanted to go. I turned off the GPS and used good old intuition which led us to a really bad road where I almost crashed. I turned back on the GPS and found a better option which led us back to civilisation and pavement. We rode for what felt like hours until we found our refuge in a tiny cafe in Taralaga. Once inside Mike informed me that his pants were not water proof and he was soaked from shoe to shaft. The nice ladies in the cafe let us dry out and enjoy the warmth while we evaluated our game plan. Mike changed clothes while I changed our route from Canberra to the warm NSW coast. We delayed as long as we could having coffee, lunch, dessert and finally tea before we felt we'd overstayed our welcome. Knowing we must need fuel we stopped to fill up and had a faulty pump. It showed we only needed a few litres each. I checked my notebook and was very embarrassed that we had only gone 50kms since Oberon.

Our new route paid off with our first glimpse of sunshine of the day and an easy ride to Braidwood. We arrived at another pub, (we had given up on real camping by now) and unloaded all our wet gear into the room. I snuck into the maids area and put all my clothes in the dryer and stocked our room up with tea and coffee. The rest of the night was spent at the bar drying our gear, filling our bellies and easing our cold bones with liquid medicine.