Julie and I were supposed to be hiking the 5,000km Continental Divide Trail in the US in 2020, but COVID-19 derailed that plan. Instead, we will have an adventure in Australia, circumnavigating the country on our bikes, a distance of about 16,500km taking approximately five and a half months. We will use minor roads where possible and occasionally catch ferries across rivers and inlets to avoid busier inland routes. We will camp some of the time and stay in motels, hotels, etc, at others. There will be stretches of up to five days with no accommodation or resupply available, so we will need to be self-sufficient.

Round Australia Bike Ride - Day 039 - Normanton

Day:  039

Date: Sunday, 09 August 2020

Start:  Normanton

Finish:  Normanton

Daily Kilometres:  0

Total Kilometres:  4112

Weather:  Mild to warm and sunny

Accommodation:  Motel

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  None

  Lunch:  Fish, cabana & chips/Doner kebab & chips

  Dinner:  Chilli con carne & rice, ice cream

Aches:  Nothing significant

Highlight:  Restful day

Lowlight:  None really

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

We slept in, then did some more detailed planning for the next eight days so that we knew what food to buy when we went shopping later in the morning.  Our plan was to visit a cafe for breakfast on our way to one of the small supermarkets, but it was closed, as was every other cafe and pub in town on this Sunday morning.  In the end we visited each of the three small supermarkets in town, a couple of kilometres of walking because it's a spread-out town, and multi-sourced our needs.

We gave up on breakfast, and returned to our room to sort and repack our food, before having lunch at the adjacent Purple Pub bistro.  From there we went for a walk around the more historic northern end of the town.  Like most of the smaller outback towns we have visited, it is quite clean and well-tended with wide grid-patterned streets and some well-preserved older buildings, but it also has lots of defunct businesses, vacant lots and a sleepy seen-better-days feel.  That said, there were plenty of campervans and caravans in town, and regular road trains rolling through, so some business is being done.

On our walk we also visited what was claimed to be a life-sized replica of a locally-shot saltwater crocodile (now protected) accepted by Guinness as the largest recorded of the species.  It was massive.

We then returned to our room and spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing before attending to a few other chores and having our usual microwaved dinner.

We expect to be camping by the road tomorrow and won't have internet access, as will often be the case for the next week, so the blog posts will become intermittent.

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