Sydney to Mount Panorama via Oberon & Rockley
A full-day motorcycle escape from Sydney through Bell, Oberon and Rockley, combining great country roads with the chance to ride your own bike around Mount Panorama.
Skip the quickest route to Bathurst and make the ride part of the day. This full-day motorcycle escape heads west from Sydney through Bell, Hampton, Oberon and Rockley before arriving at Mount Panorama, then loops back towards Sydney via O'Connell. The route is sealed throughout, so you don't need an adventure bike or off-road tyres. Expect flowing country roads, fast sweepers, changing elevation, open farmland and much lighter traffic once you're away from Sydney. For me, the interesting riding starts around Bell. From there the route through Hampton, Oberon and Rockley has some excellent country roads, with the scenery constantly changing between bushland and open farming country. The roads between Oberon, Rockley and Bathurst were some of the best riding of the day. The highlight is Mount Panorama itself. Outside events and other closures, Mount Panorama operates as a public road. The circuit is 6.213 km long with 23 turns and a significant change in elevation between the bottom of the circuit and the top. The speed limit around the circuit is 60 km/h and normal NSW road rules apply. Even at normal road speeds, riding Mount Panorama is well worth doing. The Cutting is much steeper than it looks on television, the road becomes surprisingly narrow across the top, and at Brock's Skyline you get an incredible view across Bathurst before the road drops sharply down through The Esses. From there you descend through The Dipper and Forrest's Elbow before coming onto Conrod Straight. There is also some great motorcycle history behind Forrest's Elbow. In 1947, motorcycle racer Jack Forrest crashed his Norton there and badly scraped his elbow. Fellow racer Harry Hinton started referring to the corner as Forrest's Elbow, and the name stuck. Forrest reportedly had the handlebars of his motorcycle altered so he could still reach them with his injured arm and went back out to race. I ended up doing six laps of Mount Panorama while I was there, partly to experience the circuit a few times and partly to film it from several different camera positions. For the return trip I headed via O'Connell…