Had the opportunity to have a couple of hours ride on the fire trails from Kariong to Pearl Beach this morning – riding on my own, haven’t been on the dirt for some time, so decided to do some slow, relaxed riding.

A lot of this track is fire trail but there is a very interesting section near the Woy Woy rubbish tip where you climb up and over a “mountain”. It’s pretty rugged and requires some technical skills along with some bike carrying.

One of the large flat rocked clearings

On the “mountain” near the tip, with Brisbane Waters in the distance

Steeper here than it looks in the picture – bike carrying section this one!

And now here are a couple of video clips, just to prove I was taking it easy today.

(Yesterday I picked up my new iPhone which has slow mo movie capacity so I took the time to place the phone in the bush at a couple of water bars and record the Ripley in action.)

The last 2 k or so of this ride is a sweet downhill run to Pearl Beach. I’ve enjoyed it in the past but these days I’m afraid to get a little bit of air between my wheels and the ground and it was the first time I had done this rides since I’d learnt the rubber doesn’t always have to be touching the dirt.

And what a blast that section was today. There was one part of it with several jumps, one after the other. As my wheels spun silently in the air on the last of them I became aware of a few adults with a large group of young children walking toward me (or was I riding toward them?). They believed the latter for the leading adult started waving his hands as though he were an RTA worker trying to slow down the traffic or a windmill. He obviously thought I couldn’t see them and would fly over or through them. Of course, I was already in the process of reining the Ripley in and applying the freshly installed XT brake pads. I snuck slowly by them but once the last child was past me, I was off again, B lining for the beach below. Yeah, that was a nice way to finish a pleasant ride!