After almost a day of packing and getting the camper ready for it’s first trip in a while we finally got on the road to Kellevie and headed towards our first HellFire Cup for what we hoped would be 4 days of fun on and off the bikes. Our plan was arrive the evening before and meet up with my riding partner Liz and a few others and camp together on site. Sharon’s partner Nic lives a short drive away and would be travelling each day. Liz had brought her friend Jess along as a support person and she took most of the great photo’s you will see in this series of blogs. We arrived late in the afternoon and setup the start of what was to be know as “Camp Inappropriate” for the duration of the event. By around 21:30 others had joined us and we had a tent and camper city all around a common central area that ended up with a 3Mx3M marque in it for shade.

We did not need to be too early to bed as racing started at 10AM on the first day to give travelers a chance to arrive on the morning of the event. A pretty uneventful night for Colin, Sharon, Liz, Jess, Jody and Brendan plus a few others camped close by visiting and hanging out. Andrea, Nic and Sue all turned up the next morning and after going to the most boring race briefing in history we were almost ready to race the first stage a 25km loop around Kellevie and surrounding areas. A good mixture of single track linked up by some fire road with around 650M of elevation gained. Liz and I took 1:50 at a nice pace to complete it, Nic and Sharon 2:14 with Sharon not feeling too well on this stage but it was probably just nerves about racing the event.

Lunches are provided as part of the entry fee and there was a selection of great wraps, fruit, anzacs and slice on our return. Time to veg out, digest food and prepare bikes for the afternoon stage a 4 lap relay around a 6.5KM loop on the Kellevie property. You each do a lap and then tag your partner on for the next lap. You get to do your own pace in this stage as you are not riding with your partner so I ramped it up to the max on my 2 laps and put in a couple of quite fast laps overall (no where near the elites of course who in their own race). I knew this course like the back of my hand as it was 90% on the HillBilly 24HR trails.

Everybody had good laps on this stage and we all retired for well earned food and a beverage from the onsite Iron House Brewery and some wood fired pizza or cooked something. There was a movie on in the main arena but we all hit the sack for the 8AM start and longest stage tomorrow. Day 1 done and dusted, 3 to go – Results and course notes.

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