TravellingStrom

Saturday – Ceduna, South Australia

Just a quick note here, I am currently just about to leave Kalgoorlie in WA(17th March), heading north to Laverton then east to Alice Springs via the Great Central Highway. The road is dirt from Laverton, but if the cops say it is OK at that town it will be 3 days or so before we reach AS or any internet coverage. I am traveling with Dereck, a chap on a GS, we had met in Melbourne last time I went around, so it is good to have company on this section. Follow my SPOT if you are interested

Well I was up at sparrow fart and because of daylight saving down here it was still dark when I had brekky downstairs, just bread and cereal etc, but part of the deal. I was on the road and leaving town by 6am, I think, as I had different times on my camera, phone and laptop? Anyway, it was a great dawn shot of the headgear at the southern entrance to town.

It was sunny to start with and a bit cool but I reckon by what I see up ahead, it was going to get damper quite soon and it was not long after that I hit the South Australian border.

My initial destination for the day was around Port Augusta but as I reached that around midday after the Flinders Ranges twisties, it was no use stopping now, so after some lunch I kept on going, next goal was the West Australian border maybe who knows?

There were a lot more bikes around and just like the PanAmerican Highway in SA, this road bottlenecks at a certain point and there is no other real choice to get across the paddock, so I would expect to see more and more as I continued. A lot of people would be ahead of me though having started a lot earlier, which was why I was doing long days.

Now, just after that photo was taken I got into the town of Kimba and wanted to take a photo, this was when I lost my camera! A bit of background, my camera is clipped to a lanyard which hangs around my neck and goes into the left side jacket pocket when riding, this is easy to get to when I want to shoot on the run and no problems with dropping it if I need both hands on the bars. Now, because of the wet windy weather, I had on my over jacket, the bright fluorescent one, but it has no pocket that is easy to use, so I slip the camera into the side pocket of my tankbag. The lanyard is a tad short though and sometimes when I shifted around I would find it swinging down by my knee which was a bit annoying. So, anyway, I got to the truck layby at the entrance to Kimba when I noticed it missing and no lanyard around my neck either. 😦 I was thoroughly pissed off at losing another one, so I turned around and rode back for a long while slowly searching the sides of the roads, hoping to see a bright pink camera on an SES orange lanyard. All the cars, bikes and trucks I had passed went by me again as I searched in vain. I ended up riding back east about 20km until I reached a point where I was pretty sure I had the camera. Then I turned around and did the whole 20km back again and kept on searching, still no luck. By now I was resigned to the fact I was going to be looking for another camera but I kept on looking until I reached the truck layby at Kimba again with no luck 😦

Now, I must say that if you have read this far, you will realise that I must have found my camera or where did I get the photos from eh! Well, after getting off the bike at the same place I felt a bump at my back, and I had felt that bump a few times while riding up on the pegs while looking. I had thought it was just the over large jacket flapping, but when I took the jacket off, I found the damm camera hanging by the lanyard down my bloody back, crikey I felt like a big galah, and lucky for me this town has a big pink one, that is what I felt like at this point and I am sure my cheeks were a tad red!

Needless to say I lost an hour of time doing all that crap, so I headed off after grabbing some fuel and pushed on westward and after more windy riding I ended up at Ceduna late in the afternoon after being blasted by headwinds for the 4 afternoon hours as well as rain. I picked the first motel I came to, a bad decision which I realised too late, but I was here now. I ended up at the club down on the beach for a beer and a feed, and got soaked again going back to the motel, I am glad the hot water was in abundance. There was no internet here and I had not found a shop that sold Virgin mobile internet, which Peter had shown me as being the best deal for data per month, so I did bugger all, read a book and went to bed early. Tomorrow could be a long day across the paddock, without a throttle lock either. I had looked in every bike shop I went past but in QLD they are illegal and no other store had the one I need, which is the NEP CC4, they have the CC3 and CC2, but these won’t fit a Suzuki. Never mind, let’s see what tomorrow brings, hopefully not more rain and wind 🙂

Day –946 km and 588 miles
Trip –2,541 km and 1579 miles

Cheers
TravellingStrom

WORLD

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