Dave and Jen For Oxfam

Yesterday is a day about things we did not actually do. We did not go for a full day’s ride on the Gold Coast. We did not take photos of the beautiful beaches and esplanade. We did not film anything at 24 frames per second. We did not soak up the sunshine and the fresh air. At no stage did we take a break to rest, eat a banana and recite some kind of pleased utterances about this or that. We didn’t even plot our course on GPS and utilise the Google Maps and Flickr API’s to publish these to the website. Yesterday was nothing like this. Yesterday blames Saturday.

On Saturday. Well on Saturday Jen was dragged along in my wake as a guest musician in a band booked to play at a festival by name of Parklife. As an annual event it has grown considerably to a sell out capacity of about 25,000 I believe. The venue this year was the rather beautiful surrounds of Brisbane’s Botanical Gardens with the rather impressive Riverstage surrounded by a number of smaller stages and sound systems. This is actually a spot we ride through on our training rides along the river, which I assure you is not typically full of teenagers in singlets and hot pants with extremely wide pupils. Whilst probably one of the more enjoyable festivals I have played or been to in a while it was still a very hot day to begin with. The climate of Brisbane at this time of year is the ramp up into Summer and it is both hot and humid but far from unbearable. Jen and I spoke about the humidity we have been told to expect in Cambodia. The locals must surely think us mad to ride mountain bikes down dirt roads in the heat of the day, but here we are getting increasingly excited about the prospect. Only about eight more weeks until we fly out!

The day passes quickly and we soak up some great music with the benefit of the odd dash backstage to grab cold water and catch up with colleagues and old friends. Not being much enticed by the festival food stalls I manage to eat my way through an entire box of Carman’s muesli bars. Jen and I chat for a while about our largely positive experiences with fresh roadside food stalls in third world countries in comparison to our feelings about the idea of eating sushi sold at a dance music festival. I’d rather eat spiders.

The more musically inclined reading this might recognise the post title as a reference to the band Soulwax and indeed it is, as indeed were they a stand out set on the night. We watch some bands, I play the gig, we head home, I fall asleep reading travel stories and for the sake of the story let’s say I dreamt about mountain bikes and saving the world. Indulging in a late morning I am woken up to Squishy being poked in my head and a reminder of plans to go riding on the Gold Coast. Given the late morning, aching legs and the mess that accumulates in the studio preparing for gigs we instead use the day to catch up on naps, cleaning and planning. In that order. Feeling a little guilty we dig a hole in our schedule and plant the entire missed day of training, roots and all, into the following week and water it with a promise to not get so tired or distracted this time. We make a promise to Squishy, just to be safe, and look to the week ahead.