Friday – Broken Hill, New South Wales
I missed Peter leaving as I slept in, but heard him take off, thanks for putting me up and nice to catch up again, until next time 🙂 I got packed and was about to leave in the rain and then spent the next ¾ hour trying to find the damm house keys, I had them a short while back to unlock the garage. I found them in the end, lucky for me and then as I mentioned left in the rain, yuck and this continued for ages and once again I saw standing water and flowing creeks which are normally dry. I hoped the rain events did not cause any bad flooding to block my progress as I hate backtracking, but I may have to do that at some time.
The rain sort of eased around Nyngan but it was still a bit cool and blustery. The showers continued on and off all day through to Cobar, where we had our first Vstrom gathering and got better and worse as I continued west, I even spotted flocks of Emu out here, but they get moving pretty fast when you slow down for a photo session!
It has been blowing quite hard from the west, so I seemed to be chewing fuel at a higher rate than normal and although I had the extra jerry can with 5 litres, I tried to not use it, so I was glad when I rolled into here.
Once I was full again it was continue west into more occasional rain showers, there were lots of goats on the road and off and eventually I started to run into flood waters, not what I wanted to see this far from anywhere!
Just after this I spotted a small group of riders stopped so I checked to see if they were OK. No they weren’t OK, the Cagiva had a major computer stuff up and was toast, but they already had someone going into Broken Hill for a truck. I hope they got home OK, they were not part of the Ulysses group but another rally. They did say the water gets deeper later on and when I got to that area, I could see it was a bit faster across the road, so I ended up getting wet feet again as I stood up on the pegs!
After the water I could see that the rains had done some good, lots of green for a change and after an hour or so I saw the headgear at Broken Hill sticking up above the horizon and I was glad to make it this far as well, it had been a long day 🙂
I went to the same pub as I had stayed at before and they are Ulysses members, so I got a small discount 🙂
While unpacking and later in the bar, I was chatting with some other travellers, they it seems were here to do a run on the salt lakes to do some speed tests with an electric bike 🙂 One of the chaps was the mechanic and the other the electrician and they hope for a 200kmh top speed during the week long event, a shame I was in a hurry to go west, this could have been interesting. They opened up the van and showed me the bike, a bank of batteries where the motor normally is and a large electric motor as well. The electric bikes do not have a clutch, it is instant power and max torque, I would love to have a go at one of these one day 🙂 You can tell by the back tyre, it is very easy to smoke this thing up 🙂
After a great dinner and a couple of beers, it was off to bed for me, I wanted an early start as I had another longish day ahead. I was not sure of the target, but probably somewhere in South Australia near the middle somewhere.
Day –979 km and 608 miles
Trip –1,595 km and 991 miles
Cheers
TravellingStrom
WORLD 
TravellingStrom 