Ride's over. Let's head in for refreshment…
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Usually when I ride from home (above), I take the quickest route to the Brisbane Valley Rail Trail. That's about 750 metres or around two minutes.
The return trip defaults to a long grind up our street which was laid out in the 1970s. Back then, 'town planning' of suburbs like ours which were neither town nor country often amounted to drawing two parallel lines on a map (a sheet of paper?) and chopping up the space between the imagined roads into plots of around a hectare each.
In the video below, we leave the rough section of the rail trail (state responsibility) as it meets the edge of civilisation and becomes a concrete bikeway administered by the city council. Turning off the bikeway we head into 1990s suburbia in which houses are crowded together on blocks of land that are less than a fifth of the size of those in our neighbourhood. The streets, littered with concrete humps, roundabouts and 'slow points', are named in honour of wine grape varieties. Here the husbands are morally obliged to keep the grass under control rather than let it resemble the antipodean version of the Seregenti which prevails nearby in the semi-cleared scrubland which Jen and I have called home since the mid-eighties.
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