IT STARTED out innocently enough – 29-year-old Darwin pilot Dan Mewing was looking for a “wow factor” way to raise money for Movember.
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“It was my 10th year doing Movember, so I wanted to do something big and a little bit different beyond just growing a moustache,” he explained.
Spying his wife’s single-speed bicycle in the backyard, Mr Mewing thought he might be able to raise money by pledging to ride the ladies’ bike all the way down the Stuart Highway to Katherine.
“I set a goal of raising $3000 and I said if I managed to raise that I’d do the ride,” he told the Katherine Times.
“Then that figure came and went quite quickly, and ended up at about $7500.”
After rolling into Katherine on December 7 after a gruelling three-day ride, Mr Mewing described the adventure as “one of the toughest things I’ve ever done”.
“The whole idea was to make it a big event, and really only Territorians understand how hot and how hard something like that is,” he said.
“Friends down south might think, ‘Oh, 300 kilometres on a bike, it’s not that bad’, but the heat and the road, and the bike itself made it gruelling.
“It’s a single speed, quite old, kept getting flat tyres and snapping chains, and all that sort of stuff.
“It was tough, it was very, very hot, but also a lot of fun.”
Mr Mewing thanked his wife, Nicolette, his family and his friends for their support and for accompanying him on the journey.
Back in Darwin, the intrepid fundraiser had to deal with a case of heat stroke.