TravellingStrom

Tuesday – Kalgoorlie,Western Australia

I managed to squeeze out a blog entry today before packing up and heading east. There was no great rush, but as I alluded to yesterday, I needed to do a few things, the main one was something to cover my left hand grip. I have heated grips, and for some reason this one has ‘gone off’, and by that I mean the rubber has gone all soft and sticky and sticks to my glove, which would be unsafe in the dirt. I had bought some amalgam tape in Albany, but that has not done the job like I thought it would. I intend to find a sports store and get a tennis racquet handle thingy 🙂 On the way east there were a few things to see, mainly to do with the water pipeline, but I did spot a lot of trees with the bark peeling like streamers, very unusual, well to me anyway 🙂

There were a number of pump stations along here for the pipeline and I went down one of these roads because the sign said railway formation. Well, I have only a very small idea what that road was about, it was a one way only and heading east but I think it may have been the bed of the old railway track they had back then. It went for about 5km maybe and the only thing that worried me was skippies popping out of the shrubbery!

The next little diversion was an old pump station, where a crew used to live and maintain the pump system, not much of this remains though.

From here on in it was just cool damp riding conditions through flat land and for some reason, once again I am experiencing headwinds. Now, I had headwinds yesterday going north, so that meant the wind was from the north, so today I expected it from the left, but no it was from in front and to the right, very strange, the weather is playing silly buggers with me I reckon! I am sure I have not experienced a tail wind on my whole trip!

I got to Kalgoorlie around lunchtime and while I was keeping an eye out for a Red Rooster, I spotted a sports store and a bank, so the grip cover and money was done and while it pissed down I stayed inside the tucker shop and had a nice lunch 🙂 Of course I had to leave, but it was only a short distance to the place Derek had booked and this is where I found out he had been here since yesterday, oh well, I am here now 🙂

After getting settled in and doing some homework online, mainly to do with the weather etc and the route we were planning on taking, we decided we needed extra water, he had been shopping and bought food for himself etc, and also a 10lt jerry of water. He decanted that into some collapsible bags for his panniers and I used the container to fill up with tap water and strapped that to the pannier lid. This may take some extra packing effort tomorrow just to rearrange things again. By this time I was sure it was beer o’clock, but Derek could not help me there as he does not drink! But, we ended up down town at a bar with ‘skimpies’, now this is a mining town and some of the bars and other shops are open 24/7 so we had a near enough decent feed and some beers(for me) while chatting about this that and the other and checking out the scenery 😉

It was an early night of course because we had 400km to start the day on pavement before we hit the dirt, and there was going to be about 1100 kms of that, not in the one day of course!!! The road home down the Kalgoorlie main street is tiled with helpful lines to get you back from the pub, I nearly fell over trying to follow that!

Day –241 km and 150 miles
Trip –5,312 km and 3,301 miles

Cheers
TravellingStrom

WORLD

Go to top of page