The annual ride with Damien

Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 01:11pm

Yesterday Damien and I went for a ride. This is on track for being an annual event as the last ride we went on was last January. However I have still been going on rides, either by myself or with Hamish.

So where did we go?

A few months ago I found out about a trail along the old Maroondah Aqueduct which sounded interesting:

Bicycle Path - Maroondah Aqueduct Trail (with Main Road) at Bikely.com

But that isn’t much of a ride so it needed to be part of something bigger. The obvious choice is the Diamond Creek Trail, but we had riden that before. Then Damien suggested cutting across to the Ring Road Trail which led to considering another path that we have not covered, the Craigieburn Bypass Trail (now signed as the Galada Tamboore Pathway):

Craigieburn to Ring Road via Hume Freeway at Bikely.com

So that is what we ended up doing:

Bicycle Path - Eltham to Craigieburn (with Maroondah Aqueduct) at Bikely.com

The day started with catching the train out to Eltham, followed by tackling the Maroondah Aqueduct Trail first. Riding along Main Road was fairly average, but it was quite nice once we got to the acual aqueduct as most of it is lined with pine trees. Once we got to Allendale Road it was clear why the recommendation it to do the trail anit-clockwise as it is a sizeable hill down to the bottom of the Diamond Creek valley. It was easy to maintain 65km on a mountain bike.

After passing the railway line and the Diamond Creek Trail we continued up the other side of the valley, thankfully not as steep as the way down, and then along the pipe reserve to get to Diamond Creek Road. From there it wasn’t far to the path alongside the Greensborough Highway which meets up with the Ring Road trail. None of this was particularly interesting.

Once we reached the Craigieburn Bypass Trail it went from not particularly interesting to annoying as much of the trail was dominated by the thump, thump of the concrete seams. It was only towards the end that it changed to sawcut concrete. Even then we cut it short by leaving the trail early at Craigieburn Road to get to the train station to head home.

I would ride the aqueduct again and use the ring road trail to go between other trails, but there is no point to ride along the Craigieburn Bypass. If I were to do it again it would only be to start at Craigieburn and ride south as that is downhill.

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