I'm on support with John, that way the happyjoy people can cycle merrily into the sunshine. Evan and Jonas are carrying queen Tanya on the trike (she has a seat strapped to the rack). That could be exciting on the hills. 93km to go, roughly. We need to be there for our official reception at 5:30pm, so people are leaving early. There's a band thing tonight at the University of WA celebrating the last night of their environment week and some of us want to go to that.
Rang Gary of the WA Recumbent Riders and he's going to ring round and see what's happening. Our pack out was pretty quick, everyone seems to have got a little jolt of enthusiasm from the closing circle. They're all out by 9:15am, when the van leaves. Not much group stuff left in the van, we just have the gear from five or six people who are involved with trike and van. Oh, and Aunty's tripod. Bindi is also helping on the trike, they have Jonas' bike and will swap round.
We definitely have hills here, and civilisation. Traffic, to be precise. Looks a bit like the North Island volcanic plateau country in winter, or at least it does to someone who has been looking at desert for two months. I may be wrong. And it's spring, so the lambs are young and but the grass doesn't look lush enough to be New Zealand.
We get directions to the nominal destination, and manage to cope with city driving. Well, I shut my eyes and scream a lot, but we don't actually hit anything (I think... Do they have speed humps on main roads?). Anyway, eventually we find the house where we're staying and meet people.
The people are amazingly nice, there's a shuttle service taking people away to have showers and there's food and everything. We pack bikes into their shed and unpack all over the place. They have a giant outside study that we'll be sleeping in, so I pitch John's tent on the lawn. Due to a bit of organisation and too many painkillers I miss out on a shower and don't recall too much of dinner, but I'm sure it was very civilised. I went to sleep.