The photos below I snapped about 100m from home. (And, at 4pm on a day of 36°C, I now recommend against the barefoot option.) The road is Albury’s internal freeway, opened in 2007, and is part of the Hume – the major transport route between Sydney and Melbourne.
Exciting, hey?
Well, perhaps exciting is not the word. Yet it is good & useful, brings more safety, etc. A road worth having.
(Another aside: this road probably enabled us to buy our house. I understand not one other offer was made on the place, with the road about the start construction. I don’t mind this road.)
Here comes the roads & rides part of this posting. There’s a tiny sign in the above photo. For your convenience, I have a separate shot of it for you. You are still welcome to visit Albury and read the sign for yourself.
You can enter the freeway at this point and ride north – which I have done – all the way to Sydney – which I have not. You can go across the river, and from there ride the whole freeway to Melbourne. That’s over 500km north, or 300km south. But the two or three kilometers which cross the Murray River? Never!
Daft.
This road a great surface, good shoulders and good visibility. The alternative cycle-way is like following Alice down the rabbit-hole. So down the rabbit-hole we go.
I have seen one rider, though: a bmx guy with no helmet. Perhaps I should have run him over to point out the dangers of this smooth piece of tar. Maybe next time.