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 093 - Coober Pedy to Glendambo

Day:  093

Date:  Friday, 02 October 2020

Start:  Coober Pedy

Finish:  Glendambo

Daily Kilometres:  254 (click for Julie's Strava and photos)

Total Kilometres:  9734

Weather:   Mild early then warm, sunny and windy

Accommodation:  Motel

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  Salami roll/Ham salad roll

  Lunch:  Ham salad roll/Salami roll

  Dinner:   Hamburger & chips, ice cream

Aches:  Nothing significant

Highlight:  Saw our first emus of the trip.  They ran off before we could get a picture, but it was good to see them.  We would have expected to have seen more on the trip, but maybe we just haven't been looking in the right places.

Lowlight:  I failed to fix in place the heavy elastic strap that helps hold my rear rackbag on the bike after our last rest break and it got caught in my spokes, wrapped around the rear hub, and snapped with a big bang.  Doesn't seem to have damaged the spokes, hub or brake, and Julie has retied the broken strands so it might still be usable.  I was very annoyed with myself for risking a more serious bike problem.

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

Originally, we planned to take four days to ride the 568km south to Port Augusta from Coober Pedy, but a check yesterday of the weather forecast and warnings for the next week caused us to change our plans.  Simplistically, the forecast is for strong northerly winds for two days, followed by strong southerly winds, rain and cold weather for the two days after that.  Consequently, we decided to get as far as we can towards Port Augusta while the winds are favourable.

So for today, this entailed waking at 3am and leaving about 3:45am to ride the 254km to Glendambo where I had booked a motel room.  This would be our longest day of the trip so far and Julie's longest day ever.  We needed to be there before 7:30pm if we wanted to buy food or drinks, hence the early start.  Making the journey in time would require us to average 22+ kph while riding, so to track progress, I (anally) worked out where the rest stops were from Wikicamps and calculated what time of day we needed to leave each to be on schedule for a 6pm arrival in Glendambo.  There were no stores or other settlements for the whole 254km.

The early riding was in the bright light of a full moon which made it easy to see the flat treeless plains beside the road after we had left the lights of a sleeping Coober Pedy behind.  We had a light tailwind which made the riding easy and after an hour or so the eastern sky showed a tinge of orange.  In another hour, the sun rose above the horizon and for a while we had a low full moon to our right and a low sun to our right.  We were in balance.

For the rest of the day, there were regular changes of scenery, which ranged between treeless gibber plains to scrub and to light woodland. There were some gentle climbs which yielded nice views across the plains, and towards the end of the day, we began to see some red dunes.  All through the day, we noticed how green everything was, possibly as a result of the rain we had seen earlier in the week.  In some places, there was almost a park-like carpet of new short green grass amongst the trees.  We were also riding through the Woomera rocket testing range and there were regular signs reminding us it was an offence to leave the highway.

At each rest stop (we had six during the day), I checked our progress, and it was clear that with the strengthening wind behind us we were easily going to beat our schedule.  Other travellers came to speak to us at some of the rest stops, and one caravanner kindly gave us two cold cans of Coke.  Another traveller took great delight in detailing how his fuel consumption was 50% better because of the tailwind and how he had met a caravanner travelling in the other direction who had used so much fuel into the headwind he didn't have enough to get to the next service station (Coober Pedy).

We reached Glendambo a little before 4:30pm and checked in, happy with how the day had gone.  The wind had been a great help, but we felt we were overdue for a tailwind.  We bought an early take-out dinner from a roadhouse near the hotel/motel.  This is a tiny settlement and the roadhouses (there are two) and hotel/motel seem to be doing it tough.  The fairly large pub is only open from 4pm to 7pm, and the roadhouses not much later.  The motel has scores of rooms, but I think there's only about three being used.

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