At the start of this year I was in a very transitionary period of my life, I had just split from a long term partner and needed to get a post University job and was terrified at the prospect of moving out on my own and starting fresh. Partially to avoid this responsibility and partially because the timing would have never worked out better I decided to dump all my belongings in a friends garage and tour my bicycle from my hometown Brisbane Australia all the way through Sydney, then Melbourne and finally Adelaide. This trip all up took me two months and encompassed 4000kms of pedalling.
At times this trip was a complete slog, riding for 8 hours in the saddle (my taint has never been the same since). But that slog made me some of the proudest of myself I've ever been.
Even whilst I was on the trip I was thinking about what I could make to commemorate this adventure that I could keep, display, and would represent my trip. After a lot of sketching and hours of talking with friends over what I wanted to make and how I wanted to represent the trip I decided on a map of south east Australia where I toured would show off what I wanted to show.
As I had tracked the entire ride on Strava, I had documentation of where I stayed every night and the route that I took during the day. Because of the scale of the piece I knew the route didn't have to be a perfect of what I actually rode but I did want it to be authentic. So I just put every night of the trip into google maps and screen grabbed the route it planned out. The real work then started in AutoCAD where I had to scale and trace that image and I was then able to create a model of the route that I was happy with. I even added spots at key landmark cities I stopped at. I did have to design it to be printed in 3 different sections as my 3D printer has a very small print bed.
Using this CAD model I also produced a scaled printout of the section of Australia I wanted the project to be. I then glued that onto a piece of ply wood and cut that out meticulously using my scroll saw. I knew very early on I wanted a live edge for this project so after a lot of sanding to get the edges just right I was then ready to paint.
Now the painting.
This was an absolute nightmare for almost no reason. I felt so out of my depth and unsure at every step, I could not get what I wanted from the remarkably simple paintjob. First step was picking a colour which was its own hell-scape of decision making but once I picked a nice strong green and put it on I was not convinced as I found it too uninteresting. This was compounded when a friend of mine (Love ya Matt) said immediately 'oh is just New South Whales?' I knew that expressing the scale was going to have to be a priority to really show how far I actually rode.
After weeks of deliberating and thinking of ideas (and mostly fear) I finally decided to go for it and paint state lines to create scale and more interest. I immediately f*cked it and painted them both too thick, a bad colour and even painted new state lines that weren't real. These new state lines looked more important than the route which was not the effect I wanted at all.
After this flounder I finally asked my wonderful friend Janet to help me by painting the state lines. She helped me pick a more appropriate colour and had a better trained hand to paint the fine lines with a miniatures paint brush. The wonderful work she had done had me in awe. I was so thankful of her work because by this time this project had been floating around my house and workshop for about 4 months and it had been bothering me so much to see it in its un-ripened state loitering around my house in various states of unfinished. Not just the relief of having it done but just how amazing it looked! The relief of having it done felt amazing but not as much as how happy with it I was! Janet understood exactly what I wanted and executed it amazingly.
All that was left was the final finish of the edges with sandpaper and oil and to mount it to the wall (I'd used French cleats which I couldn't recommend highly enough). And here it is!
This is a project I designed to be simple enough to repeat in the future as I plan on taking more of these adventures. My dream is to have a special wall with lots of these routes and I have magic memories of an adventure for every one of them.
This project turned out fantastic and It is exactly what I wanted it to be when I set up. I wish however I had been more decisive early on and had the strength to finish this sooner as it did upset me a lot as the weeks turned into months and I had not picked the project back up.
It feels amazing to have completed such a rewarding journey and to have a hard earned memento to commemorate it.
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