Day 108, Wednesday, 15 July 2009

Distance travelled – 70.8 km
Avg speed – 17.2 kph
Max speed –  25.4 kph

Camooweal to Bush Camp

We had another one of those hard days today with the wind blowing unfavourably to our direction of travel. Our original intent was to try and do the 261 km from Camoooweal to Barkly Homestead Roadhouse in two days, but after 70 km of battling the wind we called it a day at 2.30 deciding to camp the night at Avon Downs Rest Area which meant we would need three days to complete this leg. We had planned for this and had left Camooweal with three days water supply, so were were not worried by the situation.

We had lunch today in the middle of no where with no trees in sight at the turn off to Austral Downs. There was a convoy of 4WDs parked along the road but we ignored them and sat down on our stools to make salmon and tomato sandwiches in the shade of our bicycle panniers.  As we ate, one of the men from the convoy wondered down the road for a chat. We discovered he was part of a survey group assessing housing in remote communities as part of the ‘intervention’. He was an architect and was responsible for producing plans  for each of the houses, the others in the group  had various occupations through the building trades. He had some interesting stories to tell about his experiences so far but these were cut short when another vehicle pulled up and they had to get underway. You meet interesting people in the strangest of places.

One thing that did get us thinking was that he mentioned that the company they were contracted to would not let any of their subcontractors camp directly on the ground as it was known that brown snakes sometimes cuddled up to a warm body at night. As we rode away from lunch we discussed how we felt our tent was nice and secure from such visitors as the doors zipped to the roof leaving no gap at the floor, but we agreed to secure our bags better than we have been doing each night in case we take on an unwanted passenger without knowing. We have a habit of blindly digging into our bags for things so we decided we would forgo the expereince of finding a snake in a bag.

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

On the occassion we passed this sign it was only stating the obvious!

The sign should read - "Warning headwinds increase fuel consumption and may cause cyclists to get disgruntled with each other"

Looks like our friend "Marty was here"

This is not ours but we would be interested to hear the story behind it.

This was lunch - we kept the butter and cheese in the shade of the panniers.

Bush Camp 090715 - drying yesterday's washing.

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