Sapphire QLD

Submitted: Sunday, Sep 12, 2021 at 18:48
ThreadID: 142556 Views:5439 Replies:1 FollowUps:7
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Hi,
Have just left Sapphire after a very enjoyable week. I was staying at the Sapphire caravan park which is great.

Most people go to Sapphire and have lots of fun and success looking for Gems (Sapphires mainly but we did find a small ruby).

We had great weather as well.

However the point of this post is not to do with gem hunting but something else.

In recent years my wife and I have been carrying our ebikes with us so we decided to explore the many tracks running through the area. It was fantastic fun. An ebike is not essential but at our age it helps a lot :) and makes things possible. Still lots more tracks to do.

There are many tracks out there and you can easily get lost ( if you have no sense of direction like me). The main thing is to find your way to the coffee shop in Rubyvale .

What I did was I made a track by looking at the satellite view where you can see them and then tried to follow it using Exploreoz Traveller, Once I did one trip I then captured the GPX file of that track and imported it into Traveller (I did not use Traveller to capture GPX as was using a cycle app)

With one track that you know were it goes you can then branch out with confidence following other tracks and if you get lost head towards the known one.

The tacks vary from dirt road to some fairly rough bits including one stretch of really fun MTB type riding. Red dirt mounds ! Much more fun than looking for gems and funny enough we generally went through this track going out or coming back or or both and it is marked on my Traveller maps so I could find it each time. There are also some very challenging hills.

All my tracks ended up at the coffee shop in Rubyvale. :)

Enough of the rant. Just want to point out there is more to do there than chase gems!.

If you talk to Victoria the owner of the Sapphire Caravan park she will fill you in as she came along on a couple of our rides.

It was great fun and worth doing if you like off-road riding.

If you are out that way give it a go.

Richard







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Reply By: Michael H9 - Sunday, Sep 12, 2021 at 19:08

Sunday, Sep 12, 2021 at 19:08
Thanks, that's very timely as I'm researching ebikes right now.

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Follow Up By: Member - Jim S1 - Sunday, Sep 12, 2021 at 19:21

Sunday, Sep 12, 2021 at 19:21
I'm also looking for e-bikes .......... but I want them to fold up into a Cornflakes packet size !!! :)

Cheers
Jim
"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." A fisherman.

"No road is long with good company." Traditional

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Follow Up By: RMD - Sunday, Sep 12, 2021 at 20:14

Sunday, Sep 12, 2021 at 20:14
Jim.
You want the dehydrated ones, much lighter.
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Follow Up By: Member - Rich - Sunday, Sep 12, 2021 at 20:17

Sunday, Sep 12, 2021 at 20:17
I have Trek Powerfly 4 FS bike. Loads of fun.
It is a mountain bike so if you only want it to ride around streets to work etc you may find something more suitable. Carrying is an issue as they are heavy and you would need a few corkage packets.

For me the big thing was the battery size. The bigger the better. Mine is 625 wh.
Some other makes have larger batteries.

We easily travel 60+km with a charged battery but that varies on your weight and terrain riding in. I reckon I could push it to 80km by conserving the battery a bit by riding in a lower power setting or even turning it off. I road 100km last year by doing that. It was all on dirt tracks but a fair amount was down hill. I turned the battery off and just road as fast as I could, hitting 30-40kph.

But they are a lot of fun. You can ride a lot of the tough 4wd tracks with these bikes. Hills are not a problem but still require some push and leg action to get there.

The ebikes are not mopeds, you still have to pedal to get your bike to move. They assist your pedaling only. But do it bloody well !!! I can go up hills and terrain that I would not have a chance of doing without one. My wife also has one and we now can ride longer distances together.

E bikes are also limited to 25kph in Australia. Ie they will only assist you up to that speed then stop assisting. You can ride faster but that is done with your our own power.
Some people build their own, a mate of mine did, by importing the parts from overseas. These bikes often are not limited to 25kph (which is illegal by the way). You can also buy attachments to override the limiter for some ebikes as well, I believe TREK have changed their firmware to stop this. In NZ it is 30kph.

The easiest thing to do is go and hire one for a day or a few hours and hit the road/tracks. If you are pushing 70 like me and not really fit like me you will love it. The fact that when you go out riding nothing phases you like wind or big hills so you go out and ride more which in the end is better for you. Ie unless you do stupid things and fall off (no more on that one).

Good luck
Richard



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Follow Up By: JOHN C36 - Monday, Sep 13, 2021 at 00:23

Monday, Sep 13, 2021 at 00:23
Jim.
How about one of these?




Brompton electric bike


Cheers,
John
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Follow Up By: Member - Jim S1 - Monday, Sep 13, 2021 at 07:15

Monday, Sep 13, 2021 at 07:15
Yeah, they are OK, but still way to big and bulky and heavy for my purposes. Don't want bike racks, and have tried a fold-up bike in the canopy for one long trip, and it was a PITA.

Can still walk, so that will have to do.

ps I see that a Qld company is producing hydrogen powered vehicles ( real , this time). Must say I rather fancy hydrogen power. How can we make hydrogen powered electric vehicles? Best of both worlds.

Cheers
Jim
"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." A fisherman.

"No road is long with good company." Traditional

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Follow Up By: PeterInSa - Monday, Sep 13, 2021 at 08:47

Monday, Sep 13, 2021 at 08:47
Richard
The coffee shop at Rubyvale could be interested if you could put your tracks on Paper, with them as the destination ( focal point), could be a sales bonanza for them
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Follow Up By: Member - Rich - Monday, Sep 13, 2021 at 09:45

Monday, Sep 13, 2021 at 09:45
It is actually the strudel place in rubyvale and is well known there
He is about to close fir the season I believe after cutting off parts of his thumbs.

The strudel is home made and worth a stop
I have provided the the owner of the Sapphire caravan Park with a few of the GPX files I created , most going to the strudel place and some pics of the tracks I followed

The owner even came out with us for a couple of rides as she was not confident of going by herself.

The GPX files I have are all stored as tracklogs on Traveller but are private but if interested I can make them public.

To be honest you only need one track to get you going as you use that as a reference to get back to the camp

My objective was to stay off the bitumen which I did mostly.

Richard
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