Our hearts may be full of love and warmth for Oz, yet our wallets may be obscenely empty.
For those of you who can't afford a decent visit to "Your Chance To See The Old Man", hop on the Beehive teleportation system. We'll try to tour the biggest hill of the TDU : Old Willunga Hill Road.
To get to Down Under, we'll probably have to first get the hell out of 'Up Over'. How will we do that? Simple. Give a spank on that globe, let it dance around and voila! Embrace the Southern Hemisphere!
Please, do not try to jump into Australia. This is not drawn to scale.Patience now. Lets zoom into the wonderful land of Kangaroos.
Calm down. I see some of you are getting excited...We're now approx. 100,000 feet above Willunga, in the sunny state of South Australia.
Please calm down, we'll get there. Do not eject or do a Chesley Sullenberger either...Our Chinese digital zoom frankly sucks. Switching to European opticals.........
.....aha, there's Willunga!
Do you know Willunga is known for its almonds? Sadly, the Aboriginal word for Willunga does not mean "Land of Almonds". Gotcha there. See how I tricked you? Infact, the word actually means "Black Duck" - that's more uneventful than almonds.The road shown with the red arrow is our destination. Its the Old Willunga Road.
It is featured in Stage 5, the longest stage of this scorching Tour. Riders ride two times over it and it could perhaps be the most strategic spot for attacks.
Old Willunga is basically a 1000 foot climb, little over 6K in length at almost 5-6% in ave gradient.
The ancient Aboriginals never rode bikes, but it is said that they could jump so damn high, the could reach the top of this road with little effort.
Marvel at the beauty of the ups and downs of terrain. For essential cows, beautiful sunflowers and a McDonalds, please use your wild imaginations. There are only bushes and bush fires here.
We have come to the end of our trip. Thank you and please boast to all your friends that you just went to Willunga... in a little over , let's see....one fifth of a second. Thanks for joining.
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Thanks for this very nice introduction. I can't wait to test my legs on Old Willunga. I will take lots of pictures and show them off on my blog on Monday! :-)
ReplyDeleteGroover : Sure. Good idea. Enjoy the ride!
ReplyDeleteActually that's from intuition--we later learned about it in dynamics, but that's stuff I just figure out because I'm a geek and have a natural understanding of things that prevents me from "properly" learning them!
ReplyDeleteBTW thanks for the Willunga description--I didn't realize it's a 1k vertical, that's definitely serious! My money is on Stuart O'Grady for the win.
It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be but certainly a great climb. :-)
ReplyDeleteGroover : I'll be waiting for the pics! Looks the pros had an easy time over it. Lance looked like he was comfortable using a huge gear on it too.
ReplyDelete