Danya and I rode out to Parramatta today, getting somewhat lost. It was a slightly longer ride than I planned, but we found that there’s a fair number of bike routes around the place, although you might not know it. I had the Edge switched to Map mode all the way from Homebush Bay, although it was a decent demonstration that what a map displays is not necessarily indicative of the actual situation on the ground – or it might be if the symbology was clearer. Having tossed the Garmin maps and placed a copy (a bit dated now) of the OSM cycle maps on the device, there at least some indication of the bike routes, but they only appear as slightly thicker and bold versions of normal roads. At various zoom levels they are either hard to distinguish from roads, or else appear without connecting roads. Maybe some of this is due to the limitations of the Edge, but I think that some more work could have been put into the rendering of the OSM map data.
Anyway, we went via a straightforward path to Homebush Bay, and wandered out to the lookout at the end of the mangroves and wetlands. It’s amazing how many really, really ugly apartments fill the foreshore at Rhodes where all that industrial stuff used to be. The ground there must have so much toxic rubbish in it!
From there we headed down past the bulk of Olympic Park, and should have headed west over the water to Newington, but I couldn’t quite work out from the map where we needed to go, and we ended up down on Parramatta Road. Eventually I decided that we had to head north to get to where the Duck Creek path was. After that it was a simple matter of following the path around and under the freeway. Not knowing exactly where I came off the freeway on the way back from Katoomba, I decided to keep following the bike path as far as we could. That meant that we turned south to Holroyd and Merrylands at exactly the place I need to turn north and dog-leg onto the freeway heading west. You can see that by saving the above route and the Katoomba return into Google Earth and looking at them together.
Anyway, we rode all the way out past the Merrylands Shopping Centre, and then turned north to Mays Hill. We ended up at the Murugan (Tamil) Temple on the Great Western Highway, which has a wonderful facade, as seen in the previous link (or on a google images search) before I decided that we had come too far west.
Turning east, we wandered back to Harris Park before I found the freeway and the bike path, and then followed it all the way back to Homebush Bay, where we stopped for refreshment at a corner-shop below more butt-ugly apartments at Wentworth Point. The ride back from there was, minus a slight detour through the outskirts of Olympic Park, the reverse of the ride out; Danya had people coming over later in the day, so we didn’t take the Cooks River back to the markets for lunch (although I got the usual gozleme from there after I got home).
All in all it was 63km (for me – 55 or so for Danya) and 4 hours. I have found where I need to go for the ride to the mountains in a couple of weeks, and we’ve had our first serious training ride for the ‘Gong.
