Sunday 1st September, Fathers Day, & Lynda had to be on deck for 4 hours, or so, at Fairfield Campus NMIT to assist with their Open Day. So being a good lad I said I’d drive her there and back and lend a bit of a hand if needs be – the deal being that I hitch the bike to the back of the car and make an escape for a couple of hours if I became surplus to requirements.

Eleven o’clock and the shorts & helmet were on and I headed off into quite a ferocious (for a bike rider) Northerly headwind to explore the Merri Creek Trail – breaking new ground for me. Down the steep ramp onto the trail and under Heidelberg Road bridge was surprised to see some very old looking palm trees which seemed quite out of character, and I wondered who and why they were planted there in the first place. The second impression I got was the excessive amount of garbage that was caught in the creek side vegetation, obviously the result of previous flooding down the creek and the lack of respect for our environment by a significant percentage of our populace.

Progress was rather slow not only due to the irksome Northerly but also being a lovely sunny Sunday morning I had to negotiate a host of walkers out enjoying the day with their prams and poochies of varying shapes and sizes – which was actually not a great problem as I was in no hurry to get anywhere.
The trail was a bit ‘up and downish’, some interesting bridges, quite pretty in parts (not so much in others) and at times one could forget you were riding in the middle of city suburbia. The under bridges sported the usual standard graffiti in varying shades of awfulness with nothing memorably artistic.

Finally made it up to Coburg Lake (never knew they had one!), turned around for the return journey welcoming the cyclists delight of having the brisk northerly on your tail and making the 24km round trip back to NMIT for a BBQ sausage lunch.