Six months of planning have just gone down the drain - but I’ll get to that in a little bit. My name is Scott Barnett and my brother, Patrick, and I are going to circumnavigate the Australian continent by bicycle beginning this November.
While my reasons for embarking on this trip may differ from my brother’s, we do share a common goal - we want a REAL adventure. The kind of adventure where safety, comfort, and success are not guaranteed. Personally, I think that there is something satisfyingly visceral about taking a sabbatical from my corporate cubical and setting off toward the unknown horizon. What I am seeking can’t be found as a weekend warrior on the Tahoe Rim Trail or during a long weekend on the Lake. In a society where your career defines your identity, it is both liberating and potentially suicidal to put one’s professional life on hold in order to do something of this scale. Not that my brother and I are social misfits or reclusive - we like HDTV and fast food just like everyone else - I just think that we were fortunate enough to realize that there is more to life’s bottom line than a paycheck every two weeks and a lemming-like obedience to social norms.
Philosophy aside, in order to make this trip a reality we needed to plan our route. The stark reality of the situation is that we aren’t avid cyclists and we know very little about Australia. While these shortcomings are precisely part of the trip’s appeal, the fact remains that we are largely shooting from the hip. When we are not feigning cycling expertise to friends, family, or any stranger unfortunate enough to ask what we’ve been up to, we passively peruse the internet and Google Earth to see which Australian locations catch our fancy. Recently I found a website touting a 30-foot tall anatomically correct plaster bull in Western Australia that I’d like to get a closer look at. Nonetheless, at the end of the day our planning largely comes down to throwing darts at a map. All we know for sure is that in order to circumnavigate the continent in less than a year we need to cover 10,000 miles, averaging around 50 miles a day. Now before all of you hard core cyclists scoff at this seemingly insignificant daily average, remember that we are each carrying 30-40 pounds in gear, and we are going to have to ride in the heat, rain, sleet and snow. We are like the postal service, except there won’t be snow, we don’t deliver packages, and we complain a lot.
Until recently we had planned to start in Sydney and complete the circumnavigation in the counter-clockwise direction (anti-clockwise for you non-Americans). I’ve read three books on Australian cycling and each one suggest the counter-clockwise
