Day 110, Friday, 17 July 2009

Distance travelled – 75.2 km
Avg speed – 24.9 kph
Max speed – 32.3 kph

Bush Camp to Barkly Homestead Roadhouse

With only 73km to Barkly Homestead Roadhouse we had a leisurely morning getting up just before sunrise in contrast to an hour before sunrise yesterday. There were a lot of caravans on the road today and they started passing our campsite at 7.30am which made us wonder if these Grey Nomads know how to retire and take things easy. The flow of traffic with vans and trailers was predominantly west to east, which we thought interesting as we could not think of a reason why this should be. We would have thought it would be even in both directions.

Progress today was exceptionally good, averaging 25kph, which probably makes it our fastest day of travel so far and in sharp contrast to our ride out of Camooweal for the same distance two days ago. Today we completed 75km in 3 hours 1 minute of riding time whereas on Wednesday we completed 70km in 4 hours 6 minutes of riding time, all over much the same terrain. The difference was the direction of the wind.

Today we finally caught up with Yuki, an 18-year-old Japanese cyclist travelling around Australia by himself. He started his trip in Cairns and we were told he was probably only 20 minutes in front of us just after we had left Mt Isa. But with different lunch stops and campsites it has taken us 6 days to make up that 20 minute gap.

Denise and I had dinner at the roadhouse. It was a little disappointing and not on par with the quality we have had at other roadhouses or truckstops. Based upon the quality of the meals we suspect it is more of a tourist stop and not a formal truck stop as truckies seem to demand large, hot, well cooked servings – ours was a little over cooked and just warm. Still better than cooking ourselves but I suspect if we come this way again we will “eat in”.  As we ate we watched with amusement as a group of Victorians tried to get VFL football on the TV, they did not seem to understand they were in the middle of nowhere with limited TV reception.

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

Bush Camp 090716

Packing up

Very big termite mounds in the middle distance

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