Friday, November 4, 2011

Darkness falls across the land

We're still hammering out the details of MGG #5 but we have a date, time and rough course so, lock it in! :

Date : Friday December 16th
Time : 1:00am  (yes, technically this makes it a Saturday morning start!)
Start : Hurstbridge Train Station
Map : Melbourne Gravel Grinders #5 - ???


Your eyes are not deceiving you! This is a night ride that will coincide (more or less) with the Summer Solstice. Stay up late on Friday night, jump on the train and meet us at Hurstbridge station for a 1:00am rollout. We'll do a grand tour of the area around Hurstbridge under the (almost) full moon and be back at the station in time to meet the early morning trains at 5:00-6:00am.

There are a couple of differences between this ride and previous MGG rides :

  • For this ride you will need lights - not little blinky lights for cars to see you, I'm talking proper lights that will light up the dirt road in front of you so you can see where you're going. There are no streetlights where we're going and the moon may be obscured by cloud.

  • There won't be any food stops so you'll need to carry all the food you plan to eat. Much as the little general stores of the area have enjoyed our patronage, I doubt we can convince them to stay open all night.

  • This may end up being more like a group ride. Depending on how many and who turns up, we'll probably group together more so than in previous rides. Wouldn't want to lose anyone!

  • It's at night! This means you'll have to convince your partner, mum/dad, parole officer etc. to let you stay out all night and come home in the morning looking like a sleep-deprived zombie on wheels. Saturday morning's probably going to be a write-off so keep your calendars clear until you can catch up on some sleep.


Right, that's enough info for now. Get your lighting rigs in order, block out the dates in your calendar and we'll be back soon with more info as we finish our course recon and finalise the details.

3 comments:

  1. Oh. We've been hanging out for GG#5 after missing #4 and for an instant were stoked to see a return to the hills of the northeast until discovering it was a night ride. Seems like a cool idea but just not do-able for us (and probably plenty of others). GGs 1-3 were so good, I hope you return to that format first up in 2012.

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  2. that was insane...a pretty special experience

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