If you have never done the Darra Day tour, a typical pre-skate conversation might go something like this:

“Are you doing Darra?”
“Yes.”
“Done it before?”
“No.”
Sharp intake of breath.
“You’ll die!”

Darra Day seems to have taken on a legend all of its own. It sports hills with names like ‘Cardiac Arrest’, ‘Spinal Compression’ and ‘Absolute Certain Death’ (okay, I made the last two up, but you get the idea). Speaking to almost any regular tour goer, you’ll quickly be told Darra is the hardest event on the calendar, eclipsing, Black and Blue, Captain Redscar and even my own personal nemesis tour, Valley Yum. It is regarded as the tour most likely to break your spirit, chew you up and spit you out in little pieces. So the question has to be, would the Angel of Death be escorting me to a better place or would I survive to pass on the legend?

The tour was supposed to be starting at eleven with the new meeting place being somewhere on the south side of the Goodwill Bridge. This was due to the square still undergoing an extensive make over which involves fencing it off, digging it up and then leaving it in this state for an unspecified length of time. A couple of weeks ago, a football match had sucked up all the parking spaces for miles around, this week; there was a Picnic in the Park. Sounds fairly innocuous you might think until you saw the number of people trooping over the bridge in the direction of the park. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of hard core picnickers sporting all manor of picnic related paraphernalia were marching steadfastly towards the four square feet of grass they would be staking out as there own little patch of picnic heaven. God help anyone who dared to get in there way on the long march to picnic nirvana! They may well have been walking down the wrong side of the footpath, but this trifling detail was not going to prevent them from delivering a torrent of verbal abuse to anyone who had the audacity to be skating towards them and slowing down their progress in the quest for the best spot at the alfresco dinning experience of the year.

All this basically meant that an eleven o’clock start was pretty much out of the question. Michelle, who was leading the tour, had found a parking spot but it had involved an early morning run in to secure it. Bruce also turned up more or less on time, but when Michelle explained that a large, fast downhill portion of the tour would be negotiated by taxi (for safety reasons), he looked extremely disappointed and decided to rest his ankle shortly afterwards. Vaughan had given up looking for a park completely and decided to meet us at Milton instead. Paul, who had arrived first, was the final member of the tour staff which meant that the only people now missing were the actual skaters. Mel was waiting with Paul when I turned up and was raring to go. A few minutes later Anne arrived having just witnessed hundreds of Hogs stream past her car (the motorcycle variety and not the raw materials for hamburgers), and that seemed to be pretty much it. We waited another ten minutes but it was apparent that no one else was coming. With no introductions necessary, we set off in the direction of Milton train station. While we were picking our way through the rampaging picnic mob, Michelle got a call saying Shaun would be joining us, but if we carried on he would catch us up.

We were soon easing our way along the Coronation Drive bike path and quickly met up with Vaughan who had made his way back to join us. Shaun also shot into view and we were ready to head over to the train station.

Milton train station has an impressive four platforms, an unspecified number of parking spaces (that’s QR speak for none), a ticket vending machine number of 105 and most importantly of all, it is a heady nine meters above sea level. Ticket vending machine number 105 turned out to have a rather sensitive ‘1’ key. This caused a few problems as Darra station has a destination number of 115. A slight tap on the ‘1’ key caused the machine to go into a ‘1’ frenzy and select a destination of ‘111’, which is of course Graceville (the derivation of which means ‘an agreeable village’). As agreeable as Graceville sounds, it’s not Darra. The solution was to tap the ‘1’ key with such minuscule force that your finger barley made contact with it. Even then, it was still impossible not to end up with two ones. Knowing this meant a single tiny tap on the ‘1’ key, a quick prod of the ‘5’ key and get your money in quick before any more ‘1’s could be inserted into the mix. All this took time to work out and as the mass of skaters assembled around the ‘1’ obsessed machine trying to get tickets, the Darra train glided smoothly into the station, unloaded a gaggle of slightly disorientated out-of-town picnickers, digested anyone going somewhere without a ‘1’ in the place code and promptly left.

As we sat patiently in the afternoon sun waiting for the next train, Michelle and Vaughan began to embellish the legend that is Darra. It seems that the secret of a successful Darra tour is to pace yourself. With just a single food and drink stop at a bakery opposite the station at our destination, it is important to load up on sugar and liquid before setting off. Too much liquid however can also be a problem as there is also only one set of toilets and these are fairly early on in the skate. If you go too fast early on, you won’t have the energy to tackle the endless undulations at the end but you can’t go too slowly because it is a long way and there is a lot of ground to cover. As we contemplated the folly of our decision, another Ipswich bound train pulled into the station, we jumped on board and we were on our way.

Disembarking at Darra Station (3, platforms, 183 parking spaces of which 85 are secure, ticket vending machine code 115 and 26 meters above sea level), we made our way across the road sans skates and proceeded to empty the local bakery of its entire days production of sausage rolls, sticky buns and custard tarts. With almost two hours now past and a quick skate over to Milton our only effort to show for the day, it was time to get started in earnest. We pulled our skates on, stowed our water bottles and set off behind Vaughan.

The early going was good, with nice smooth paths and a couple of downhill runs to break us in gently. Our route basically followed the Centenary Highway all the way back to town. Although there were a few narrow paths early on, these were soon swapped for nice wide concrete bike paths. There were undulations aplenty, but the downs balanced out the ups and with such a small group, progress was swift.

After about three quarters of an hour, a bumpy, leaf strewn section of path veered steeply away from the road. We followed this short section of tree lined rough tarmac next to a river until it came out at the end of a road. We had arrived at the base of Cardiac Arrest. This is a hill that could put the frighteners on a mountain goat and would have off-roaders reaching for the low ratio gear selector before contemplating the climb to the top. We elected to tackle the hill from the more difficult north face without the aid of oxygen or Sherpas, but with a benefit of a healthy ration of jelly dinosaurs. Shaun went first, arms and legs a blur of manic energy and promptly disappeared round the first corner. The rest of us set off at more of a trudge and with a gritted determination began the long climb to the top. As we rounded the first corner we were met by the rather unwelcome sight of more hill. The initial climb had maybe put the first third behind us. Even Shaun, who by all accounts is a complete hill monster, looked to have slowed down ever so slightly. For the rest of us, the plod to the summit continued. A few minutes later a small patch of grass at the top contained seven gasping, purple faced skaters mentally patting each other on the back for making it without stopping and physically trying desperately to breath enough oxygen to get some feeling back in their legs.

It was the next section of the skate that had so disappointed Bruce. A run down to Fig Tree pocket was deemed too dangerous because of a lack of path, the narrowness of the road and the number of blind bends that would have to be negotiated. Instead a taxi was ordered and it shuttled us down to the bottom of the hill in a couple of trips.

Deposited at Fig Tree Pocket, we now had a clear run back to Toowong along the super smooth, wide and clear bike path. Thanks to Michelle and Vaughan’s advice, we had indeed paced ourselves early on and were now in good shape to tackle the uphill sections of the run back. As the old saying goes, what goes up must come down and the downhill sections on this path make for some fantastic high speed runs. The only hairy incident occurred when a couple of large rocks loomed up from no where in the middle of one particularly fast downhill section. No one actually hit them, but I did manage to clip one with the side of my skate and I don’t mind telling you the old heart speeded up for a while as the thought of what might have happened raced through my mind.

It wasn’t long before we were back on the Coronation Drive bike path and once more picking our way through weary picnickers, stuffed to the gunnels with finger food and sporting all manor of banners and balloons. Vaughan and Shaun set a fast pace and we were soon all gathered at the Domain, congratulating each other on surviving Darra. We said our good byes and went our separate ways after a death defying but enjoyable days sk8ing.