Plans for the Evening

Monday around 5PM, after the Great Wheel Adventure, I got a text from Nikki asking if I was planning to go on the skate tonight with the local Brisbane group?  Having no idea what she was talking about, I asked if it was designed to finish the job at killing me through exertion?

She said Steve set it up and it was a leisurely cruise, just to get out and have some fun on skates.  Sign me up!

I admit I did have a slight doubt about what these gods of fitness might call cruising around, but a night skate around Brisbane sounded fun.

I met Nikki and Stuart outside at 6:30PM where we geared up and headed to The Domain to meet Steve.  My over packing even paid off.  I had a reflective vest and a flashlight; just in case something like this came up.

The city definitely looks different at night.  This is the entrance to the Goodwill Bridge from the The Domain.  That is Nikki in the foreground:

We did not cross the bridge, which I thought was nice since that is the way I had walked earlier in the day.  Instead we stayed along this side of river and went back towards the city (to the right in the image above).  There is a beautifully smooth trail that follows the river.  Left from that bridge is filled with terror and pain (Saturday’s journey).

The first bridge we came to, William Jolly, looks like there is graffiti all over it:

That isn’t graffiti, there is a projector up above the trail casting the design on the bridge.

This next bridge is the Kurilpa Bridge.  I have not moved from where I took the picture of the Jolly bridge.  This is looking back the way we just skated from:

We skated a bit farther down the trail.  This next picture is looking back at the city:

We turned around somewhere around there.  On the way back a dad and his kid were in front of us.  I was a little bit ahead of the other skaters and slowly gaining on the little kid.  The kid must have been 5 or 6 years old, very young.

He kept looking over his shoulder at me the closer I got.  At first I thought he was afraid of me, but he started telling his dad how I was catching up and he seemed to be having fun with it.  So I started talking at him, telling him I was going to catch up.  In the United States that is the kind of thing that makes parents grab their kids run off.

The dad did not say anything, and the kid squealed a little and took off going faster.  I sped up a bit to keep the pressure on.  He was laughing and having fun.  The dad undoubtedly can hear I am talking to his kid, but did not seem to mind.

I would slow down as we would catch up to his dad and then I would fall back a bit.  The kid would go slower until we had dropped back a ways from his dad and then I would speed up, he would squeal again and start riding faster.  We did this a few times.

The last time we did this I told him I was going to beat him this time, and I went pretty fast.  For being so tiny, he could ride his bike really fast too.  As we caught up to dad I figured he would slow down and hang back.  Nope!

So both of us went flying by dad.

At this point I figured, “Oh, now I’ve done it, the dad is going to be pissed.”  We were going fast enough that if the kid crashed it was gonna hurt (he did have a helmet) and then it would be my fault…  I slowed down so the dad could catch up.  As dad passed I said, “Sorry about that.”  Dad just chuckled and said it was fine.

We did a little climbing to get back up to the level of city and skated a couple of blocks in the city so that we could cross the river on the Kurilpa Bridge.  This picture is looking at the Victoria Bridge from the Kurilpa:

The bright white thing is The Wheel.

This is what the bridge surface looks like.  It is hard to tell in the picture, but it is downhill and then loops around at the bottom to go under itself.  Just what I needed, more downhill!  Steve did ask me if I was willing to do it before he sent us over the bridge; he realized I am frail.

Looking across the river from the loop in the bridge:

It is 8:40PM.  I took this picture of The Wheel so it could be compared to the picture I took of it earlier in the day.  I took some careful analysis to determine the difference in the number of people in line between the two shots:

The windows for tickets are on the far right.  Those two people in the foreground might be headed there, I did not stay to watch.  There are a handful of people queued up to get on The Wheel.

This seemed like the proper touristy thing to do.  I took a picture in the daylight too, but the picture sucked:

Surprisingly, even this late the “beach” was open.  Again I refrained from being a creeper and did not take pictures of the beach goers.

We stopped for some drinks at a pub that is right at the Goodwill Bridge on the South Bank side…. and were politely kicked out of the building itself for being on skates.  The guy was very nice about it, he came out and took our orders, he just did not want us in the bar part, and probably did not want us trying to carry our drinks in skates.

Looking back at The Wheel from the Goodwill Bridge; similar to the picture I took in the daylight:

That about wrapped up the ride.  I had a great time and am very thankful that Steve set it up and did not try to exercise me to death.

Here is the path we took on a somewhat interactive map (can move the view around):  Brisbane Night Skate and Chat  I was not clever enough to edit out the stops we took.