One of the great things about house-sitting is that you are in an area long enough to cross paths with some locally held events. Recently we cross paths with the National Penny-Farthing Championships, which are held in Evandale, Tasmania, not far from our current house-sit.
There are penny farthing races held throughout the day – these bikes are crazy things to watch racing!
Here’re some pictures of the bikes in action:
They even have races for the kids on little tiny penny farthings!
As you can see, the cyclists outfits range from people in comfortable casual clothes with sandals, to modern lycra-clad cyclist, to period outfits.
Most of these bikes are actually track bikes; that is, they are intended for racing, in that they are fixed wheel bicycles (of course, that’s an almost unavoidable consequence of the design) and they have no brakes.
Photos are great, but to really get a feel for these ungainly, inefficient, but remarkable bicycles, you need to see them in motion. Here's a video of some of the action on the day:
The Championships are held in conjunction with the Evandale Fair, which includes a few different displays, one of which is historic cars. Here's a few of the cars that stood out to me.
I don’t usually watch TV dramas, but my daughter got me onto Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries a few years ago, which were very good. Recently they’ve spun off a more modern series called Ms Fishers Modern Murder Mysteries, which, so far, isn’t anywhere near as good; however, the heroine’s car is an Austin Healey, just like this one at the Evandale Fair, but with plainer colours:
Notice that the cars are parked amongst the gravestones in the cemetery!
We finished our day off with a noisy Scottish pipe band and a couple of medieval warriors!
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Hannah (Tuesday, 26 February 2019 12:09)
Oh they are so entertaining to watch!! What improbable but quite marvellous machines.