West of Ensay to Omeo

West of Ensay - Omeo = 45km (via b500) ridden on Wednesday 28 October
Cummulative total = 683km

It was another beautiful morning and when I opened the tent up yet another wallaby was hanging around it must have been grazing at least 50m from the tent but by me opening up the tent I think I frightened it off. But you could hear wallabies bounding around us all last night as well as noisy croaking frogs.
We got a nice early start (as we are getting really quick at packing up!) and continued along our little quiet road, with excellent bush camping sites along the river, quietly going along we see a Kangaroo grazing along the side between the road and river and we must have startled it as it panicked and starting bounding along with us and was about to cut up and on to the road when it decided not too .... whether or not it realised that it would collide with us or just thought no that would lead to danger ... he continued on and as we passed it backed tracked and went up and over the road at the point where it was going to do it previously!!! Even I thought, that at that point where you could see him going for the road, that OMG it is going to collide with us if it comes up onto the road! LUCKY!!!
The quiet road rejoins the B500 and we travel along to Swifts Creek. The legs are pretty stiff and felt like lead at that point. Omeo is only another 25km fro Swifts Creek so we continue on. Just out of Swifts Creek is probably the only flat piece of road on the B500 so we enjoyed that part but I knew that just before Omeo there was a climb as the map showed that we were to climb over the Continental Divide at one of the lowest points in the Divide (755m above sea level) and as the road turned you could see the climb coming off the valley floor. And so for the next 2 hours we just climbed - up, up and up.
By this time my legs were just full of lactic acid (I felt like a Geelong footy player!!!) after the undulating hills of the days before. And believe it or not Neil was feeling it too!!! Woo Hoo I thought he too is not invincible and feels aches and pains!!! (mean aren't I!!!) so I could winge all I liked!!!

These hills just went on and on and on and finally we hit the top at 755m and were relieved that the 9km hill was over.

So we went down into Omeo and was relieved to get to the campground to have a well earned rest.
Lovely campground that is very dog friendly and huge so Kouta can roam around a bit. We will stay here 2 nights and recover before the 55km climb to Mt Hotham which we will do over 2 days. At least we know that it is just straight climbing and not up, down, up, down with no recovery time.
Looking forward to the climb and have pysched myself up for this and I don't think it will be as bad as what we think. We know the first 25km is 6.5% - 7.5% and then the last 30km is plateaued at 2% - 3%. There is a bush campground at Victoria Falls which is 26km from Omeo so we will head for there on Friday and finish the climb on Saturday and down to Harrietville.
From there we head to Bright and follow the rail trail to Wangaratta where we will meet Neils' parents there - I am hoping Flo will bring along some baking (especially 'grubs') when we meet them ... so if you are reading this Flo and Neil has forgotten to mention it to you I would love a double batch of grubs (1 batch for when we are Wangaratta and the 2nd batch for on the road!!!)