It is a suburb on Melbourne's northern edge, sitting beside Plenty Road and the Hume corridor, with big shopping centres, industrial estates and housing built over the old volcanic plains. A ride that has come back from the Great Ocean Road and the Otways has plenty of better places to end, but cities need ways in, and this is one of them.
The ground here is basalt, part of the great volcanic plain that sweeps across western and northern Victoria, and the soil is a heavy, dark clay that grows grass and little else. Before the suburbs, this was grassland dotted with red gums, and a few remnants survive along the creeks, particularly the Darebin Creek and its parks. Wurundjeri people lived in the area, and parts of the creek corridors are carefully managed for both heritage and ecology.
The riding is purely functional. Plenty Road is a busy arterial, the Metropolitan Ring Road and the Hume Highway are wide, fast and heavily policed, and speed cameras are numerous. If you are here at rush hour, accept that you will sit in traffic, and filter carefully, because lane splitting rules in Victoria are specific and not as relaxed as in some other places. Do check what is permitted before you do it.
The upside of a big suburb is convenience. Epping has more than thirty thousand people and every service imaginable: petrol stations, supermarkets, bike shops, and a mix of restaurants shaped by the many communities who settled in this part of Melbourne, including Greek, Italian, Macedonian and Vietnamese families. A good bakery or souvlaki place will do a better meal than any highway roadhouse.
For a more rewarding ride from here, Plenty Road leads north to Whittlesea and on into the hills around Kinglake and the Yarra Ranges. These hills were devastated by fires on Black Saturday in 2009, and the regrowth has transformed the area; the bends are worth a Sunday of their own once you are rested.