Rottnest is obviously a place to take a bike and try to factor a ride or two into a heavy schedule of relaxing. With Frances still too small to take on a bike our family transport options were limited, and all rides were solo and for the most part aimed at shopping or some such goal. In the end I managed only one ride of note, more of which later. but the big achievement of the week was getting Lydia on a bike for the first time.

Rotto is the perfect place to learn to ride, so it’s hard to explain why we hadn’t planned to get Lydia started on a bike on this trip. In fact it only occurred to us when we saw our friends’ similarly aged daughter trundling around on a tiny BMX with training wheels. The next day we went into the bike hire place and Lydia was soon similarly equipped and on her way, enthusiastically riding off as soon as a bike had been selected.

The first challenge was learning to pedal and look where she was going at the same time. With that sort of mastered it was time to think about the brakes. This is going to take a while, but by the end of the week she had started to get the idea. But not before dopey Daddy had decided she was ready to go solo down a (very small) hill in the “forest” next to the Geordie Bay store. She failed to negotiate the bend at the bottom and found that a tree trunk makes an effective emergency brake. No harm done and good training for those hair-raising alpine descents in the Tour.

Bike riding became a feature of the rest of our holiday for Lydia, and since returning she has asked several times where “her” bike is, so I suspect it won’t be long before she gets a machine of her own. It was a concern that on a few excursions she decided to walk after a few tens of metres leaving Daddy to shoulder the hefty BMX, which must have weighed as much as both my road bikes combined. On the other hand she certainly has my, umm, competitive streak - every time a bike went past her she said “I’m going to catch them”.

Having stretched all my running muscles with an ill-advised 6 km trot round the lakes I felt incapable of undertaking the second run I had in mind, so when some free time came up on Saturday I jumped on the recently refurbished MTB instead. With new rims and revived shifters it was now almost a pleasure to ride, though the bag of grit milling away at the headset was now painfully obvious. Still, having brakes that slow you down in a controlled fashion rather than grabbing at the horribly worn rims and throwing you off the bike was definitely a feature. I opted for the all-island route, taking in as many of its roads as possible with minimal overlap adding up to 34 km.

Switching from relaxing to exercising was easy enough, but someone needed to tell the rest of the island I was coming, as other cyclists were keen to use every bit of road except the left. We should rename it Paddles Island! It’s amazing how the combined effect of endless undulations and a bit of a breeze limits your speed. Despite going reasonably hard I could only manage 28 km/hr average, though perhaps including both major “climbs” (the lighthouse and Oliver’s hill) slowed me down a bit…

I had completely forgotten that C.C.Callipigie were on the island for a secret training camp, so it was a pleasure to bump into Mrs Paddles on the jetty as we prepared to leave. She and Collette had ridden down to see Sharon off, concerned about her steadiness after too much training the night before.

All of this makes me think we need a C.C.C. family fun day at Rotto some time.