Round Australia Bike Ride - Day 069 - Daly Waters to Elliott

Day:  069

Date: Tuesday, 08 September 2020

Start:  Day Waters

Finish:  Stuart Highway, 10km south of Elliott

Daily Kilometres:  165 (click for Julie's Strava and photos)

Total Kilometres:  7094

Weather:  Hot, sunny & windy

Accommodation:  Tent

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  Toasted egg & bacon sandwiches

  Lunch:  Ham & cheese sandwiches

  Dinner:  Ham salad sandwiches, vanilla slices

Aches:  Nothing significant

Highlight:  The first couple of hours riding south of Daly Waters were beautiful.  Usually, if possible, I like to listen to news and current affairs programs on my radio in the mornings, but in the outback that's not possible unless you are near a town.  Instead, this morning as I watched the sun light up the surrounding woodland, I was listening to Spotify's All Out 60s playlist, and singing along to the Bee Gees "Massachusetts", a song I distinctly remember listening to while on a cycling camping trip in my mid-teens in Belgium and Luxembourg with a South African schoolmate (where are you now, Charles Hodges?).  Very nostalgic.  To cap it off, a short time later, a pair of galahs flew along the road with me for a while, just a little in front of, and slightly above, my head, as though we were a formation travelling to the same destination.  Magic.

Lowlight:  I hadn't booked accommodation in Elliott, our destination for the day, because according to Google there were a couple of options, a caravan park and a pub, and worst case, we could just camp at the caravan park if they had no cabins.  Elliott is not a tourist destination, just a small aboriginal settlement in the middle of nowhere, so unlikely to be booked out.  Unfortunately, when we arrived at 3pm, hot and tired, we found the caravan park closed (plumbing problem) and the pub not offering accommodation.  Bummer!  (The caravan park/store manager wasn't very helpful.  The caravan park was right behind the store and small service station where there was a functioning toilet and potable water. Knowing we were on bikes and that it was 92km to the next town, you would have thought he could have let us camp in a corner somewhere out of sight.)

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

We left the Daly Waters Pub motel at 5:45am, a time calculated to have us arrive at the Hi-Way Inn Roadhouse, 8km away, just after its opening time of 6am.  We weren't the only ones to have timed our arrival there.  It was busy with various workers picking up breakfast and coffee, and a number of road trains that were idling or parked nearby.  We picked up supplies for the day, paying the young Asian backpacker clerk who remembered us from when we passed through three weeks ago on our way north.

Heading south from the roadhouse, the riding conditions were perfect.  Light enough to see easily, and cool and calm.  The early morning riding is always the best, and this morning was no exception (see above).  After 44km, we reached Dunmarra Roadhouse, which we hadn't been willing to count on for supplies (based on distant memory and Google), and bought some breakfast which we ate sitting on their shady verandah watching the world go by.  The roadhouse was fine, but clearly not a truckie favourite.  Just a few locals and other travellers called in while we were there.

We continued south, with just over 100km to go to our destination, Elliott, passing through wooded grazing land in a growing and fickle head/crosswind and increasing heat.  After an hour or so, a car towing a caravan pulled over to the side of the road in front of us, and a couple Julie had met in the Daly Waters Pub swimming pool the previous evening offered us cold water and fruit, which we gratefully accepted.

The riding became harder as the morning progressed.  The countryside became more open and scrubby, exposing us to the wind.  Although there wasn't really much net elevation change, we seemed to be perennially riding uphill.  There was always a crest in front of us, which when reached, revealed another crest to be conquered.  In reality, we were gradually descending after each crest, but the wind was such that we always seemed to be pedalling uphill.  For the last 30km to Elliott, after our lunch break, it was really tough with a gusty south-easterly wind almost bringing us to a standstill at times as we pedalled south.

Eventually, we reached Elliott only to find there was nowhere for us to stay (see above).  We bought some cold drinks and an ice-cream from the store which we consumed at a nearby shaded picnic table while we worked out what to do.  Since we were both hot and tired and the wind was still blowing, we decided to hang around in the shade for a few hours, have an early dinner, sourced from the store, get enough supplies for tomorrow's relatively short journey, and then ride up the road for an hour or so and find a place to camp in the scrub.

And that's what we did.  We killed an hour or two in the shade, ate our sandwich dinner at the picnic table at 5:30pm, and then rode out of town at 6pm into a still strong wind.  After about 10km of fruitlessly looking for a side road/track that might help us get off the road, and as the sun was setting, we eventually just walked into the bush about 100 metres from the road to a place where we could erect the tent and not be obvious.  We put up the tent, had a quick wash as the mosquitoes were attacking, and got into the tent for an early night.