Sprung Chicken Ride 2009

Home | Daily Reports | December | Day 266

Distance travelled – 87.8 km
Avg speed – 18.1 kph
Max speed – 43.7 kph

Port Germein to Yacka

To my surprise my right knee, although still swollen this morning, seemed to bend and move normally without any pain. This was a great relief as yesterday I had thought our journey might have come to an end. The ice Denise had managed to negotiate from the pub yesterday afternoon obviously did its job.

In contrast to yesterday there seemed to be no wind this morning and we quickly reached Port Pirie and then Crystal Brook for lunch. In fact our progress was so good we arrived before a train that had left Port Pirie when we did. Crystal Brook is an attractive country town with well presented old buildings in the main street and nice cool green parks to pause in.

It was turning out to be a warm day and we found ourselves stopping a lot in the shade to drink as we made the climb from Crystal Brook to Gulnare. Close to Gulnare we came across a number of headers working in the fields. We were surprised to see this as last week when we were on the Eyre Peninsula the harvest had been nearly completed, but here we were riding past many fields still needing be harvested. We wondered whether the extra 200-300 metres in altitude was the reason for this.

Yacka is a small town with no pub or general store but it does have craft shop that sells ice creams and as we saw the sign advertising this fact we headed straight for it. We spent the night at the community run camping ground and had the place entirely to ourselves. Because the showers have still not been commissioned there was no charge but we still managed a shower using our 10 litre pocket shower. The only downside was the mozzies that appeared shortly after sun set. They seemed to follow on from the flies, which had been bad enough during the day to require me to ride with a fly net most of the afternoon.

Zoom into the map and use the 'Satellite' layer to see our new location.