Our friend Aaron is attempting to raise $10,000 for his Ride to Conquor Cancer. As a fundraiser, and somewhat of a publicity stunt, he organised a 10km ride around Brisbane’s city cycle paths – and all on citycycles – this morning, so we trolleyed along for support.

(Note: this is Aaron’s brother, Dan. Don’t get confused – especially you, Julian.)

It was fantastic! We were blessed with perfect weather – not a cloud in the sky, and a slight chill in the air. I’ve never utilised the cycle paths in the city – neither have I ever used one of the city cycles – so there was lots of new experiences in there. Here’s the view we were rewarded with as we crossed the Story Bridge:

Our time of 50 minutes for 11.37km certainly isn’t going to win us any awards for pace, but lets be honest – this was a ride that was all about the scenery! In fact, I thought it did such a good job of showcasing just how beautiful the city is, that we’ll be adding it to our bag of tricks for the next time that we have visitors from abroad.

A big thanks to Aaron for organising, and for the brilliant BBQ breakfast afterwards!

If you have some spare cash lying around, go ahead and donate it to Aaron’s ride, and support this worthy cause!

It wasn’t long after I started riding to work that I decided I had done enough trips to justify a new set of wheels. I think I lasted maybe five journeys on my mountain bike before deciding that an upgrade was in order. Say hello to bike number two:

I believe this is classed as a “commuter” bike – similar to a road bike, but without the dropped handlebars. It’s wonderful! It’s a 2012 Merida Speeder T3, and you know that any bike whose model name contains the word “speed” has got to be fast. In fact, the first day I rode it home, my trip time was 25% faster than it was on my mountain bike!

To be fair, it’s not without its downsides – well, one downside anyway. The tires are much more prone to punctures than the mountain bike seemed to be. In the three months I’ve had the bike, riding on average one or two days per week (curse you, rain!), I’ve already had three punctures. Three! I never got a puncture on the mountain bike! But, I guess that’s the price you gotta pay for running your tires at a much higher pressure (100 psi versus 40-50)!

Anyway – it is overall a huge improvement for the commute to work, and I really enjoy riding it. And, I’m absolutely loving the selection of music that I have for my journey – basically I just put my phone on shuffle, and every song is a winner! Here’s my current playlist, for the curious:

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Blood is totally awesome – just ask Dracula! And as it turns out, it’s transferable too – and it doesn’t even have to be via the fangs-in-neck method that our favourite vampire is so fond of. (Is Dracula our favourite vampire anymore? Who would win in a fight to the death between him and those Twilight hipsters? Twilight is about vampires, isn’t it?)

In support of this transferability, the Red Cross blood van was inconveniently parked right along our path from work to Nandos, and try as we might, we just couldn’t not notice it. It’s huge!

If I were the type of guy who was into pimping out caravans, I’d definitely be stealing some ideas from these guys; their air-conditioning is the hammer!

Anyway – they didn’t appear too busy, so after filling up on chicken and chips, Ben and I signed up to bleed. I’ve tried to donate blood in the past – once, and it was way back when I was working for Compaq down the Goldie. They turned me down! There was too much iron in my blood, so they were worried that I might have haemochromatosis – a disease which causes you to have too much iron in your blood.

Now however, many years later and haemochromatosis free, the Red Cross was only too happy to harvest my goods. Of course, donating blood isn’t a competitive sport, and yet somehow they managed to turn it in to one by equipping the van with a leaderboard for fast bleeders! Apparently anything under six minutes is fast, and I managed to bleed out in 5:52. Yeah! My name and time is now written onto that board for the rest of eternity, or at least until someone wipes it off at the end of the day. If only there was a trophy that I could have unlocked.

Riding to work seems like a winner of an idea for saving money and burning calories, so Ben and I gave it a whirl on Monday this week. It was great! It’s about 17km from my place (via the scenic route of the Kedron Brook walkway), which took about 50 minutes on the way in, and 1:15hr on the way home. (Ben’s ride is an extra 4 km or so, composed almost entirely of hills!)

Here’s a few things I learned in the process:

1. Bikes ain’t bikes. Ben has a road bike, and up against my mountain bike it’s interesting to see how much quicker he picks up speed (e.g. from a rolling start down a hill).
2. Along the same vein, my bike maxes out at around 50km/h (according to the CatEye, which may not be configured correctly). And that was peddling downhill in top gear.
3. Our home suburb – Everton Hills is very appropriately named. On the way in to work, we have to conquer all the hills at the start of the ride when we’re still fresh; plus, there’s more downhills than there is up. No joy for the ride home though, hence why it takes almost half an hour longer.

I’m hoping that riding to work is something that I/we can keep up for at least a few days per week; that way, I can justify spending some cash on some upgraded wheels! And realistically, a 50 minute commute isn’t too shabby at all; on a bad traffic day, it can easily take 40 minutes on the scooter.

I also hope that buying a new bike might mean a more comfortable seat – after riding in on Monday, it wasn’t until Friday that my butt felt recovered enough to give the seat another go! Ouch!

Going back to work has really put a dampener on my routine of going to the gym from 9 – 10:30AM every morning; in fact, I don’t think I’ve managed it once since starting my contract! Consequently, I was worried that all that exercise I did to lose the beer-gut would quickly come undone from sitting behind a desk all day again.

Well, magically, somehow that hasn’t happened; in fact, I got a bit of a shock today when I weighed myself after a swim and came up with the magical number of 77 kilos! That means I’ve lost another kilogram, and puts my BMI down to 22.3.

Yay me!

Last time that Nick, Suzie and I went mountain biking in the New Forest we had such an awesome time that we all resolved to do it again. And this weekend, to make the most of an amazing spring Saturday, that’s exactly what we did! This time we pumped our numbers up from three to nine, adding Kylie, Julian, Eva, Peter, Anisha, and Kerrie to the group. We were a force to be reckoned with!

The forest was noticeably less green and lush compared to the last time we went. In fact, the ground cover was so brown and dry that I could have fooled myself into thinking we were back in Australia! This made some of the off-track areas a bit treacherous to ride on – one large stick through the spokes and it would have been game over!

Still, that didn’t stop us from trying – some of us more so than others. Predictably, Nick decided that following a track was taking the easy way out, and instead decided to carve his own path. Mostly this worked out well for him, though I think he found some of the terrain a little bit more difficult than he had anticipated.

Overall, we were following the Deer Sanctuary route as recommended to us by the bike hire company, which included lunch at The Trusty Servant in Minstead. It was a lovely pub, yet it was full of polar opposites! For example, the fish and chips were delicious (good!) – but they came with normal peas (which are on my “list of foods that should never be eaten”) instead of mushy peas (which are fine – boo!!). Also, the outdoor dining area was enormous, and just lovely in the sunshine (good!) – however we found the locals a little too friendly, and I for one wished they would have maintained their distance (boo!!). I think Anisha felt the same way.

Not long into our return journey, we somehow managed to miss a turn, and we ended up on an off-road path through some swampland. Still, it’s all part of the fun isn’t it? Plus, I couldn’t take Kylie out of London without bringing her home at least partially covered in mud; it just wouldn’t be proper! But with a little bit of compass work, we managed to find our way back to the bike shop in the nick of time – only 10 minutes before they closed up for the evening! Phew!

Once again, an awesome day out, and one I’d be keen to repeat at anytime! I think I need to get me some padded bike pants though; my butt was aching afterwards! (TMI?)

Right back when we first started geocaching, we knew it would be right up Team WeStace’s ally, and oh boy were we right! In fact, McRacey got into it so much that she pronounces her geocaching username differently depending on if Wes is there (“the bramleys”) or not (“the bramley s”). She’s already clocked up more than double the amount of finds that I have, and around half of my finds have been with her!

We weren’t too surprised then to find out that the number one thing she wanted to do this weekend was to grab some caches in and around London. She and I even managed to chalk up a couple of finds in the city before coming home on Friday night!

On Saturday afternoon we headed down to Gunnersbury Park, and while Kristy napped under a tree, Racey and I found four of the park’s five active caches. We had to report one of them as missing, because its one that I had found it some time ago, but the container wasn’t where it should have been.

Today, Racey found a set of caches which were based on a walk around a lake, so off we drove to Surrey for the Papercourt Pathways series. It was quite a nice area, though not as remote as it had looked on google maps. Still, that’s not entirely a bad thing – we got to meet a lot of puppies who were out taking their owners for a walk!

After lunch at The Seven Stars pub in Ripley (possibly the best Sunday Roast we’ve ever had!), Stacey nominated one more cache for us to retrieve, simply because it had an interesting name. It was rated four stars for difficulty, but we figured we were up for the challenge – that is, until we got there and found the cache around six metres off the ground!

There I was all ready to give up and call it a day, when Stacey came up with this idea:

You’d be surprised just how well it worked – we managed to get the cache down in no time flat! Unfortunately, putting it up was another matter entirely. Thankfully – and with a bit of Macguyer ingenuity – we managed to loosely tie the canister back to the stick using a spare hair-tie, and then I hoisted Racey back up for the replacing. It took us a couple of attempts, but we got there in the end! An awesome cache, indeed.

Sadly we had to drop Racey off at Heathrow before coming home – but on the upside, it won’t be long before @thebramleys are back in London for another adventure!

Here’s a little video that I made of our walk on Sunday. I used YouTube Vimeo for the transport mechanism because it’s pretty big (around 180 MB), and YouTube Vimeo does the whole high-def thing very well. Enjoy!

Music:
Scouting For Girls – Keep on Walking
Alter Bridge – Down to my last

It’s been almost 18 months since we took a walk with Aubain and Ingrid, so a second one was definitely overdue. As such, and to make the most of the gorgeous weather we had on Sunday, we set off on a 10 mile walk through the countryside in Sussex. Cousin’s Louise and Kylie also joined us for the trip, bringing the numbers for Team Awesome up to six.

Upon setting out on our walk, we soon noticed that the sense of humour is a little… well, “different”, out there in the country. We’re still not entirely sure what this sign meant.

Secondly, things are a lot quieter out in the country. Instead of cars, sirens, and general city ambience, the background noises are provided by birds, wind in the trees, and various farm animals. Of course, this was really no surprise to any of us, though it’s quite alarming when you actually stop and listen for the differences.

Given that it had rained a little bit on Saturday (how rare for England!), we had thought it may be a little bit muddy, but none of us really had any idea what we’d be up against. For the most part, we tried to dodge around the outside, but sometimes we had absolutely no choice but to just trolley on through. Poor Weezy and Kylie didn’t have waterproof shoes, and so they were especially noticing it by the end!

Though the mud may have dampened our shoes and our trousers, it did little to dampen our spirits! It was such beautiful scenery, and we were blessed with perfect walking weather – around 10 degrees, with loads of sunny intervals. Aubain did an amazing job at keeping us all on the right track, and at setting a perfect pace to land us back at the train station only a few minutes before the train arrived.

10 miles may have been a bit more ambitious than we had anticipated, especially given the added degree of difficulty added by the muddy terrain; but it was such a great way to spend a Sunday, and I’d be the first one to sign up again for the next walk! Suffice to say, we slept very soundly on Sunday night!

I’ve been wanting to get into climbing for ages – ever since Stacey took me in New York really – but I’ve never actually done anything about it. Well, all that changed yesterday, when Suzie asked me, “Do you want to come climbing with us tomorrow?”. It was quite the moment of brilliance on my part, I think!

So tonight, Julian and I joined them at the Aspire Centre, where we had almost an entire outdoor wall to ourselves. We had a short introduction with our very friendly instructor Seth, and then started out with some traversing (climbing across a wall without ropes).

Soon it was onto the main event, so after learning how to tie our double figure-of-eight knot, and how to belay, it was time to go up the wall! The first one we tried was incredibly easy (Nick claims that they use it for the blind kids); the second wall we tried was incredibly hard!

After six or seven climbs each, we were pretty much done. It’s amazing how quickly your wrists and hands get sore when you’re not used to climbing, and just like the last time I went, I’m sure that they’ll be even more sore tomorrow. But it’s all part of the fun, and I’m sure that over time it only gets easier!