Day: 087
Date: Saturday, 26 September 2020
Start: Yulara
Finish: Kernot Range Rest Area
Daily Kilometres: 147 (click for Julie's Strava and photos)
Total Kilometres: 8891
Weather: Cool early, then warm and sunny with an easterly wind
Accommodation: Tent
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Chicken & mayo sandwiches
Lunch: Chicken schnitzel sandwiches, ice-creams
Dinner: Soup, Creamy carbonara/Lamb fettucine
Aches: Nothing significant
Highlight: In mid-afternoon, in the middle of the desert, a large truck coming the other way stopped on the road and the aboriginal driver reached out and gave us a very welcome 1.5 litre bottle of cool water.
Lowlight: Usually, the early morning riding is the best, but this morning, as soon as we left Yulara and turned east towards the Stuart Highway, 244km away, the wind was diabolical … and cold. The first few hours was a total grind. We seemed to have to fight for every metre.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We left the campground about 6:45am on a cool and clear morning and cycled out to the highway through a quiet Yulara. It was very peaceful, but when we got to the highway and turned eastwards it was another story. We were confronted with a strong headwind (see above) that had me calculating what was the minimum distance we needed to do today to avoid running out of food and water before Erldunda, the next roadhouse of consequence. Two hours and 28km later, when we stopped for breakfast by the road, the situation was much the same. It still hadn't warmed up, and the wind continued to blow. Since we were going to be riding east for the whole way, we were resigning ourselves to a tough day, and would just camp wherever we were around 5pm. We decided to take a break about every 30km, which might get us to the Kernot Range Rest Area, 120km away for the night.
The wind persisted for the rest of the day, but did vary in strength, and our speed improved slightly. Given the conditions, we weren't looking around as much as usual, but since we were retracing our steps along the Lasseter Highway for the first 135km, it didn't seem so important. Most of the time it was just head down, butt up, and keep pedalling.
Coincidentally, the highway rest areas were about 30km apart, so we had picnic benches, which are always welcome, for our mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks. Our lunch break, taken around 1pm, happened to be at the Curtin Springs Roadhouse, where we had stayed on our way into Yulara five days ago. We weren't keen to buy lunch there, given our previous experience of the range and prices, but we did buy a couple of expensive ice-creams to follow our brought sandwiches, just because we could. As we were leaving the Roadhouse, a guy in a vehicle stopped and asked Julie about our ride and said that if we stopped in at the police COVID-19 checkpoint 12km down the road, where they were intercepting vehicles coming via a back road from South Australia, they woukd happily give us some water. So soon after lunch, we didn't need to, but they gave us a friendly wave as we passed.
All day, the country was much the same - red sand dunes, scrub, desert oaks - and this pretty much described the Kernot Range Rest Area where we arrived soon after 5pm. It's one of the Northern Territory Rest Areas where you are allowed to camp overnight and we had it to ourselves until a couple of cars with tents, arrived separately after dark. The soil is so sandy, we had trouble getting the tent pegs to stay in the ground as the wind continued to blow and had to find some rocks, with difficulty, to hold the guy ropes down. Despite this trouble, it's a nice spot to camp in the desert, and after a wash we cooked dinner in the picnic shelter and then had an early night under a clear moonlit night. The wind is still blowing.
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