Three dayer on my new WR250R

Back on a bike again after selling my drift car. I decided to go with a WR250R this time as I had been eyeing them off for a while as a nice inbetweener. You can check out my build log of the WRR here:

http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=678192


So anyway, back to the ride. I had always planned my ride down to the T. What roads, times, etc. I wanted to head off with no plan and plan as I go for something different. It was good, but being the control freak I am, it was different.

I loaded up the bike took a piccy and headed off from my house on the Sunshine Coast, turning left.......






First stop was Nambour to get some more maps for on the fly planning. This is where my GPS packed it in!!! GRRRR, just what I need on an unplanned ride! Turned out ok though, because it forced me to stop more and look at the maps because my rides are usually just flying as fast as I can without too many stops and enjoying where I am. So after getting the maps and having a look over, I decided that I would head south. I headed up through the hills to Maleny.




When there I had a good look over the maps to try to find some dirt and that would take me Southwest. Through Kilkoy and out west from there. Turns out that the nice dirt road I wanted was closed to to recent flood damage. A theme that will become very familiar over the next few days.





Did find a bit of a dirt road, but ended up being a dead end anyway, so a bit of back tracking was needed. On the road I found a friend! Bit hard to see, but in front of the shadow there is a snake:



Nice views for the top of the road anyway:














The maps then took me down through the Summerset Dam area. Beautiful spot on such a nice day!!



Rode down through the area and ended up through Esk and down the bottom of Wivenhoe dam where there was a camp site on the map. It was getting late, so I thought I would check it out.






Captain Jacks Landing I think it was called at the base of Wivenhoe dam. Beautiful spot!










When setting up camp, I realised I hadn't packed my bloody tent pegs!! So it was a hunt around all the camp sites to find old pegs people had left behind. Did pretty well too with only needing two rocks to keep the tent up! Found another one in the morning too, so was only in need of one more for the next night!

Anyway, cooked up my dinner, made a fire and set about looking over the maps to see where tomorrow would take me.





In the morning, I packed up and hit the road, still heading south, toward New South Wales. Down through Blacksoil and western Ipswich. Through Amberly where they have an air-force base. Some cool looking machinery in there!





It was pretty chilly and I had forgotten my liners for my jacket and hit a big patch of fog and it was shiver time. Down towards Boonah.





Stopping in at Boonah to then hit some dirt across to Rathdowny.



Finally hitting some dirt!!











So first bit of decent dirt stretch......wow!! It was SUPER light in the front end. I had all my tools, my food, camping gear and a 12L bladder on the rear of the bike and a thimble sized fuel tank only half full to balance it all out on the front. Front end was super sketchy, but all good, I was just taking it easy anyway.

Into Rathdowny:





Out onto the Lions road heading into New South Wales:





Beautiful scenery on this road!!



The actual start of the Lions Road:



Over the boarder:



Cameras to monitor cattle movement apparently, I am not convinced!!



Same spot looking back into Queensland:



You throw a donation into a thing here too for upkeep on the road, I donated a couple of bucks to the cause.

This was something about railway loop or something??











Nice lookout even if I don't know what I am actually supposed to be looking at!





From there, it was along an awesome road which wound its way along a creek and was just beautiful. I then turned off to what I thought was the road to the Boarder Ranges National Park, turns out I was on the wrong road and ended up on someones farm. Had a talk to the Cocky and he told me the right way and we chatted bikes for a bit.

So on the right road and heading up to the National Park







The start of the actual park:





Great riding through here with some spectacular scenery and lots of twisty dirt road.







Nice lookout:











Now heading out of the park and down toward Nimbin:



Now I have seen some traffic hazards in my time, but a Yacht????



Back on the tar for a minute, then onto a small bypass road down to Nimbin:



Yeah! Look out for us!!




There was a very distinct smell in the air as I rounded the corner into Nimbin and the cookies and brownies I had seems to have a very strange taste.......

For those that don't know, it is the pot smoking capital of Australia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbin,_New_South_Wales



Found a very interesting street name for such a renown town:




Back to the ride, the chain seemed to be slapping a bit, so I gave it a quick nip up at a servo stop. Stock tool kit did great, didn't have to get out my big tool kit after all.



Heading north now back toward the Queensland boarder. Through Mebbin National Park. More good dirt riding.





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Back on the black top toward Tyalgum.



Love these signs, basically, go as fast as you want, that is the way I read it anyway.



Chillingham:







Back across the boarder into Queensland:







Rode along Advancetown Lake and up through Beechmont. Awesome twisty bitumen! Nice views too.





Took a photo of the general direction where my parents would be on their yacht on the gold coast



Again, getting late so saw another little tent symbol on the map, turned out to be an awesome camp site once more.
















Using all of the tent pegs that I had found, I still needed one more, so I widdled one out of a stick.



All set up:






My can of spaghetti and my little bottle of port kept me warm for a while, but it cooled down a lot that night!!

Cold in the morning too brrrrrr!!!!!



The night before the caretakers said to keep an eye out if I was up early down at the creek and I may see a platypus and I did!! I was stoked, I haven't seen one since I was a little tacker with dad when we used to go canoeing. This was the best picture I could get of it:



DUCK!!!



Some kid went for a swim in the morning. This is about 6am and it is bloody freezing! I would have hate to have felt how cold the water was!!



The sun trying its hardest to come up:



There you are:



Left my jumper on under my jacket this morning cause it was way too cold.

Headed north up Mt Tamborine:



Beautiful scenery from up here!!











Ran into another WR250R owner named Justin at Mt Tamborine. We chatted for a while about the bikes and how he was entering the APC rally the lucky bugger.





Kept going north through the town of Tamborine on some nice roads then into the big smoke of Brisbane where I got a heath food kick and perused the maps for the direction I would be taking home that day.



Northern Brisbane and Samford then on to Dayboro. Again, nice roads with great views around that area.



Then up Mt Mee to the great lookout which overlooks the northern end of the Sunshine Coast.














Sweet roads all the way through to Peachester.



There were a number of these road signs around out here. They only light up if you are coming too fast into a corner and warn you the speed at which you should be travelling. To me, and I am sure others, they just egg you on to go fast enough to make them light up!!



Down onto the highway here for a bit of a highway stretch home. You can really notice it is a 250 on the highway. It is super light and not the most amount of power so you get blown around a lot and are pretty much bending the bars to get the throttle on the stops as hard as possible.

Back in the stable ready for packing up and clean

looks like a great 3 day ride; i would really like to visit australia some day .. great pics you posted. was that a hoop snake you saw on the dirt rode? back in texas i was riding on a trail and ran right over the middle of snake as it was crossing .. it was weird how i was going in one direction, and the snake another, and we hit in the middle like crossing a lower case t, its head seemed to come up as i went over it .. anyway .. question for ya, is the yellow bag for fuel?

The snake was a red belly black. The yellow thing is a 12L fuel bladder. Still waiting on the big IMS tank........

Great pics. Looks like a nice ride.

Very nice report and pics. Thanks for that.

Wow, nice!!!! I feel like I was right there with ya, by looking at all your pics!

Man that looks AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Why isn't there scenery/roads like this in the UK?????
I looked around the area on Google Earth - one day I shall visit................................................... Any chance of someone arranging a visa, some cash & a bike???