Left my trike up by the road overnight because the track to the river was a bit tricky and by the time Erin arrived it was full dark. So a little worried that the trike was out of sight, hence woke up early and started leaving while it was just getting light. Took two trips to carry all my stuff up to the trike so didn't actually leave until 7am. Plus farting around with the seat, had to move it back, then back further before it was in the right spot.
The ride was noticeably uphill for the first 30km, but that's WA "uphill". After so long in gentle undulations I suspect 1 in 100 is noticeably uphill. Then I had a nice persistent downhill run to the 72km evening rest. After yesterday the group decided that a slack day was in order, especially since with the new plan we only need to average 85km per riding day. So we're seeing a lot of people interpret that as meaning we never, ever do a day longer than 90 and we should get in some days at about 70km while we can. Evan seems less than happy, but it's really hard to shift some people in the group. Antoinette doesn't like riding, but she won't try to get short days. Not that she needs to, the emotional caretakers are all over each other making up reasons to bike short days. Possibly on her behalf, possibly they're genuine but I can't tell.
Trike speed seems to have settled at about 19km/hr. I'm lubing the chain pretty much every day using White Lightning. There's a noticeable boost when I first put it on, so I suspect there are rubbing losses somewhere in the system.
I'm still thinking about the group process a lot. It does seem that anything I say, Tali will automatically resist. Since Karratha the meetings have gone back to the original style, the tiny change was strictly temporary. Negativity is once more the dominant theme, and John has stopped attending. Chris simply doesn't speak, and I'm not sure that's better. We continue to violate policy (oops, I mean "guidelines") that we made before or agreed before the ride. Meetings (and the ride in general) lack an agreed focus, and we spend a lot of time blathering. Naima has dropped the idea of having a meeting/ process workshop to talk about other structures and play with how they work. Doesn't feel as though anyone else is really trying to improve things, so it looks as though the core group win.
Todays theory is that the group locked in to a bad system at the start of the ride, and there is a catch 22 situation: we can't change the bad process because that would need a meeting to decide and meetings can't produce useful outcomes because they use the broken process. With no verifiable output from meetings it's pretty impossible to get anywhere, and with no way of applying sanctions to people that don't follow the outcomes if we had them, there's no real way to enforce them. Social sanctions don't work with people like John and me, since they come down to casting out the offender and we're already cast out. Not much threat left there, and we both seem to feel more like "you are stupid, why would I want to be part of your group", rather than "I can't join, so the group must be stupid". I resolve to join Johns boycott of the process.
However, one benefit of the lack of plan and the flexibility we "all" demand is that I can look at the proposed camp area at about 72km, and decide that it is crap. I'm way out in front of the group, so I decide to flexibly change the plan and ride into Paraburdoo today instead of waiting. That way I can buy more food (the group is nearly out of white rice, and has no brown sugar, so I buy my own since those are what I live on).
More thoughts on the touring bike, specifically how to make a rear suspension unit that can be adjusted easily for different loads. Since the tourer will have anything from 40kg (bare bike, just half my weight on the rear wheel) up to about 200kg (fully loaded with pillion passenger or trailer) and I don't want to be farting about continually with it. An elastomer would work after a fashion, because they're quite non-linear so it would just compress more under heavier loads and you'd effectively lose travel. The other option I came up with is the pin and hole idea as used in gym equipment - pull the pin, move one end of the suspension unit to change the leverage. With a bit of care I should be able to get reasonable travel over a wide range of loads, and still get quick (sub 10s) adjustment. That way it will be worth adjusting when the load changes.