Decided to do support with Tali and see if we can talk and maybe reconcile a little bit. We have not been getting along, and especially in meetings it feels like we rub each other the wrong way very easily. Also a good chance to get photos of people riding, since I don't often ride with them and when I do the trike is a bit low for good people shots.
Managed to persuade Antoinette to let me use her tripod. She bought it (and her video camera) just before we left Sydney, but can't work out how to attach the two. In the meantime I have a tripod, so I take a couple of self-timer photos with it. Whee!
Another head wind day, the whingers all want to draft the van or get towed. We do that for a while, but it's a bloody expensive way to travel and we also need to get ahead of the group and make lunch. Or they'll whine about that too. So we leave them to it.
Lunch at 50km, group is slow to arrive and some don't get there until 3pm. It's going to be a late dinner. Erin is not too happy in the trike until we get a bit more padding to push her forward. I built it to take short-ish people, but apparently not short enough. Still, she's sitting up more and can reach the pedals which makes life easier. Other people ride a bit too. Erin's finding it harder to ride than her bike, partly head wind and padding soaking up power, but it's also new muscles and possibly more weight than she usually pushes. I'm vaguely curious about how hard she'd find today on her bike, with the head wind.
Big lunch, lots of cooking. Tali is also quite food-oriented, she uses food to make peace with people. Hence I suppose another issue between us, I don't really care about flavour, more nutrition. Tali, on the other hand, cares a whole heap about flavour and has little idea of nutrition. And I am thoroughly sick of ginger. I never have been too fond of it, but someone bought a 20kg box of it so we've been having ginger in every single meal. Seriously.
Tali likes to have three or four dishes per meal, and put lots of spices in everything. I'm driven to opt out of the cooking a lot because I honestly have no idea what her cooking plan is. We have different taste preferences, and I plan meals so differently that I think it's her or me, we don't have enough common ground to co-operate. I'm interested in cooking for her lot, but I suspect it wouldn't work at all. The idea of only eating one dish, and having no spices (read flavour) doesn't seem to make her happy when I suggest it.
Dinner is a bit trying. We gained Leo in the van at lunch which helps keep the peace. But the promised river at 80km is dry and not too appealing, so we were going to go back to the 75km mark that we had discussed with other people. But Leo and Tali were keen on the river for its scenery. I became mostly keen to camp while it was light. After a bit we went back and found Jonas and Bindi at the 75km mark, so we talked to them about it while the sun set. In the end we camped at the river. Tali and Leo seemed to have trouble with the idea that I had a preference for where we camped, but that was much more emotionally involved with camping while it was still light.
Tali became unhappy that I wasn't cooking, so we talked about that too. I said I didn't grok her cooking, that we have very different rationales for our choices in food. She wanted to know what I would cook, given the choice. I wanted to just add lentils and onions to the red kidney beans we'd precooked at lunch, and just have that with rice. I thought she agreed with that, but when I went to do it there were (more) issues with not having spices in it. So we had cinnamon sticks and cloves in the rice, and ginger in the beans and once again I walked away from the cooking.
We agreed not to do support together again. I think that's about all we agreed on for the day.