juliet

I am in Melbourne, staying with Carol & Mike (my cousins) and lo! this is very nice :-) (Good wine, good food, good company, and a Real Actual Bed with no one else in the room!)

I have also been reunited with the Cepheus-bike; put him back together this morning and set off to the nearest bike shop (8-10 hilly miles) to acquire a h*lm*t (hack spit), bike lock, inner tubes, etc. It rapidly became clear that a) the gear indexing is buggered & b) the BB sounds most peculiar. (Both problems which arose immediately after my replacement of the entire drive train in the UK, something which obviously I left until 24 hrs before the nice people were due to take the shipping boxes away and thus which I had no time at all to rectify.) So I got the bike shop to help me locate *another* bike shop who, unlike Bike Shop 1, did not have a full workshop. Cepheus is thus in the capable hands of, er, some bike mechanics or other. (I do have a card! With an address!).

There then followed a discussion about how one got back from where I currently was to where I wanted to be, without a bike. Whereupon a nice chap called Westly who emigrated from the UK sometime in the 70s offered me a lift to the shopping centre up the road from Carol's. People are lovely.

What are not lovely are my bike sandals, if one is doing anything other than cycling in them. My feet hurt. But I have done 80% of the required shopping before my departure towards Mt Gambier on Sat morning.