Day: 094
Date: Saturday, 03 October 2020
Start: Glendambo
Finish: Port Augusta
Daily Kilometres: 288 (click for Julie's Strava and photos)
Total Kilometres: 10022
Weather: Mild early, then hot, mostly overcast and windy
Accommodation: Hotel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Egg & lettuce sandwiches
Lunch: Corn beef & pickle sandwich/Chicken, cheese & lettuce sandwich
Dinner: Pizza, ice cream
Aches: Nothing significant
Highlight: Possibly the best sunrise of our trip. We were riding directly towards it under mostly cloudy skies and it turned those clouds different shades of red and orange. Rain was falling lightly from some of the clouds and these tongues of rain were turned into light orange mists by the sun.
Lowlight: Finally getting to our hotel/motel in Port Augusta after a very long and tiring day, to be told that we were assigned a room on the first floor of the very old hotel, instead of the motel room booked online and we had to carry all of our gear and then our bikes up the stairs into our room on very tired legs.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We checked the wind forecasts again last night and the picture remained unchanged. Likely strong north-easterlies (crosswinds and tailwinds) today, then a cold change coming through tonight bringing strong southerlies (headwinds), some heavy rain and cold temperatures. I convinced Julie that it would be best to have another very long day and ride to Port Augusta, 288km away, where we intended to have a couple of days off. My rationale was that if we camped short of Port Augusta after, say, a 180km day today we would likely have to pack up a wet tent and ride for eight hours into a cold headwind and rain tomorrow to reach Port Augusta. Alternatively, if we rode that last 108km tonight, although tired, it would likely take four to five hours of wind-assisted dry riding.
We decided to repeat yesterday's program and got up at 3am and were on the road by 3:40am in fairly benign conditions. The sky was mostly overcast, but there was still sufficient light generated by the cloud-covered moon to make visible the scrubby plains by the road. Our pace was OK, but there wasn't as much wind assistance as hoped. We stopped for breakfast after dawn at the Lake Hart Rest Area amongst a number of campervans and caravans whose occupants were still mostly sleeping. The lake, which had just been a salt pan the last time I passed this way, was mostly filled with water, though there were flat salty edges, while the surrounding country was mostly saltbush covered hills.
We continued on after breakfast and around this time, and later, we encountered several small groups of emus, tripling our count of sightings on the trip thus far. The expected crosswind (it was a north-easterly and our direction of travel was ESE) picked up after breakfast and it made life difficult in places, especially on one long climb up onto the scrubby treeless plateau where we stopped at the Pimba Roadhouse for a snack and to pick up some lunch and drinks. It was a forlorn place - a small collection of houses and the roadhouse on this vast windswept treeless plateau. It was also the turn-off to the town of Woomera, the historic home of Australia's missile testing. There is a collection of old missiles plus a museum (closed because of COVID-19, according to Google) and we had originally intended to detour the 20km return to have a look, but given our long day and given half of the journey would have been directly into the strong wind, we decided to add it to our bucket list for next time.
From Pimba, our direction of travel swung more to the south and the strong wind began to assist us, though there were also some long hills. We were already both very tired and had to work hard to make sure we maintained a good pace. Our journey took us past some more partially-filled lakes and to some good view points. It was very warm, though still overcast, and we were getting dehydrated faster than expected and started to doubt whether we had enough fluids. Julie, in particular, was running short, making her day even harder. One rest stop tank was empty, but with about 60km to go, we found one that still had water and she was able to refill her water bottles. That rest stop also gave good views to the distant Flinders Ranges where we will be next week.
By now the countryside was alternating between the rolling treeless saltbush hills at the higher elevations and lightly wooded scrublands at the lower elevations. There were also some demoralising very long straight sections of road that seemed to go on forever. By now, we just wanted our day to be over and every break seemed a long time coming, although the last 30km leg into Port Augusta wasn't too bad. There was no wind and little traffic as we rode across a saltbush plain with mountains in the distance on both sides, the cloud-covered sun setting behind us, and the knowledge that our day would soon be over. During this leg, our 10,000th kilometre of the trip ticked over.
We reached our hotel/motel at 7pm, just after dark, and checked in to find our day wasn't quite over as we had to lug gear and bikes up a long flight of stairs to our room (see above). After showers we visited a nearby take-away shop to find pizza was the only thing still on the menu, as well as picking up some drinks and ice-cream from the nearby supermarket. We ate back in our room, very tired, but satisfied with our day, and looking forward to a couple of days off.
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