I am writing this from the small town of Condamine, only 650km from Coffs Harbour.  The last six days have been rather different from the previous 31 as film producer Alistair Harding caught up with me and we took three days off to film.  Since then I have been back on the bike and ridden a 90km, 145km and today a 115km day to reach this point.  My legs loved the three day break as they were starting to burn every time I rode.  The most exciting thing that happened during the filming was an emu attacked the drone – the footage can be seen on the Facebook page. Fortunately the drone was not injured.  We shot some beautiful scenes with the bike along the route I had ridden and Alistair once again impressed me with his commitment to excellence, capturing this story as authentically and beautifully as possible.  The photo below is taken by Alistair of ‘Stephanie’s Donkey’ at a roadside campsite at night close to Winton.

Yesterday I met a couple who had an orphan Kangaroo called Emma and I fed it some milk for lunch. It was a welcome change after seeing so many hundreds of dead ones.Today was not a good day on the bike as I started hitting heavier traffic as I approached the major town of Toowoomba. I have two main options to reach Coffs Harbour from here.  One was a coastal route passing through Toowoomba – the second is an inland route.  I had decided on the coastal route until today’s ride. I had two incidents when I was forced off the road by a truck and a car making over taking manoeuvres which were very dangerous.  This section of road will kill cyclists with Drivers like this and I made up my mind as I rode into the town of Miles that I needed a safer route into Coffs. After some advice from the lovely Anna at the information centre in Miles I headed south on the inland route which is as she promised me – at least so far more quiet.

On Wednesday this week I will be joined for a day by two special people who will ride with me for a day which I am excited about.  Today my backside is killing me as I wore track pants over my bike shorts which somehow altered something to cause some serious chafing on my backside.  It’s very sore and I can’t sit down properly! Other than that – life is pretty darn good out here – and to TOP it all off it’s only 11 days until I see my beautiful Wife and babies again. By then it will have been a very long 50 days since I have seen them which has been the hardest part of the journey. The photo below is also taken by Alistair – it’s one of the first photos I have of me on the bike as I can’t take them myself.

Hope you all are well and happy,

Love Axe.