Hi all,
after yesterday’s “Day off” for my muscle I started early again: it was not clear if we (the bike rider and me) would get breakfast or not.
So after standing up (to early due to time saving changes), I packed all stuff together and was ready for breakfast….
We ate all at the cafe, I went then back for the restroom and left before the riders, who passed-by after some minutes. They were heading towards north-east (Bourke) while I would go in direction of Wilcannia on my first road of dirt. I had no idea how it would be like, having some doubts especially thinking of my trips in Chile (sand!).
After 25km, the bitum road changed to dirt, and as the wind helping me a little bit, I was able to cycle at about 22-28km/h. Much more than expected! Coool!
The only thing strange: I had the feeling to go flat or up. But my GPS told me that I was sometime going “down”… which I neither could see nor feel it! 🙁 So it was quite demotivating to “always” cycle slightly up.
But the views were – as up to now – just great! All kind of animals, changing colors from green, dark green, light green, yellow, “blue” for the water… and different smells as well: Epicea for “needle trees” even once pop-corn for special corn vegetables and another time “melon” as they were some wild species at the side of the street. No, I did not taste them… I was not up for experiments, which would slow me down… 😉
There was one little uphill of about 50m… but it was welcome to “climb” a little again.
The most anoying part was:
1) Trucks who neither did slow done nor go to the right to reduce the amount of poweder in the air.
2) 50m of some sand that were more difficult to ride – not to push.
About pushing: Australian say to a “bicycle” a Push-bike. And after my experience in Chile I can say that I hate that wording… it is a cycle bike! 😉
In the end I reach my day’s goal: going over whole dirt section of the highway. After 100m on the bitum, I found a side road (quite sandy) and followed it to put my tent. After removing all the sticky things with a lot of needle, I could place the underground of the tent followed by the tent itself.
At that point: the “underground” was vital to prevent holes in the tent!
Soon after building my house up, I started to cook some pasta, ate them and slept. I was sooo tired!
Cheers,
Georges
Here the day in map / numbers:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/77166261
