Climber's Tour of Victoria - Stage 3 Warragul to Sale
Now, the first of two transition stages for the sprinters - if they haven't all given up in disgust and gone home after Baw Baw!
Map and profile. 180km
Grand Ridge Road: 5km@5% cat 4.
Mirboo North: 3.8km@5.1% cat 4.
The stage starts in
Warragul, and heads toward Seaview and the Grand Ridge Road. If riders wish to get away, the climb through Seaview is a nice opportunity - and there's another chance coming into Mirboo North, which from memory steepens up a little in part. Perhaps the riders might like to partake in a beverage from the
Grand Ridge Bewery on the way through, though I'd stick to the Nut Brown Ale rather than the 11% Supershine!
From there, we meander through rolling roads to Churchill and brown coal country, and past the single most polluting electricity generator in the western world,
Hazelwood Power Station. This Beatles-era monstrosity pumps out 1.5 tonnes of CO2 for every kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, three times as much as a modern combined-cycle gas-fired power station. Victoria's brown coal electricity generation is a prime contributor to Australia's appalling record on greenhouse emissions.
The riders continue on their merry way, south of Traralgon and past the almost as polluting Loy Yang power station. The narrow roads are not particularly well-sheltered here, so if anybody has the energy and the wind direction is suitable, the peloton can be splintered. But you'd want to look at the parcours for subsequent stages first.
After whizzing through the blink-and-you'll-miss-it towns of Rosedale and Longford, the riders have a flat, straight run-in to the finishing town of Sale.
Unless you're a member of the Royal Australian Air Force, there's not much reason to visit Sale. To be fair, the Port of Sale on the Thompson River estuary is kind of nice:
Something very much worth a visit - the Ninety Mile Beach - begins not far to the southeast. We will get there tomorrow.