Monday – Alice Springs, Northern Territory
Movement again today, and we were taking different paths as well. We would ride together to the Stuart Highway, then I would head north to Alice and the Plenty highway while Derek would head south towards the Oodnadatta track. After fuelling up we headed east and the first cache for the day was at Curtin Springs about an hour or so up the road.
This is the place where the mad emu lives, which hates motorbikes, this time although we could see it a ways away, it did not bother us, so we got away without any hassle 🙂 The last time I was through here on the Rumble to the Rock it went animal, click on the link for some photos, about half way down the page 🙂 Now, the last plaque mentioned Mt Connor and this is where the next cache was to be found. It is an impressive sight by itself and over the top of the sand dunes is another different view of the salt lake in the area.
It was only another 100km to the Stuart Highway and on the way we stopped for another possible cache at Mt Ebeneezer, but no matter how we tried we could not find it 😦 (we found out later that this was no longer listed so no wonder we could not find it and the staff knew nothing about it either).
We got to the parting point around lunchtime and took a staged photo for the record, before we looked around for another seemingly non-existant cache, once again we found later that this one had been ‘deactivated’, so a waste of a walk in the bush! This is where we met a fellow traveler, Sabi from Spain who is doing a tour on a rented beemer, nice to meet you and safe travels 🙂
We had some basic servo food, including about a gazillion flies, before going our separate ways. Nice to ride with you Derek, safe travels on your way home and thanks for showing me Geocaching, I think, but it is getting me to slow down and look around a bit 🙂 I still had 200km to go to get to Alice Springs where I was hoping to catch up with an old acquaintance called Swifty, and I also had a few more caches to look for on the way, which is just as well, because this road is fast and forgettable otherwise with only a few spots of interest along the way 🙂 The first one was basic and easy while the next at the Finke River had some nice info and lucky for me a nice dunny as well 😉
There was water in the river, but not much, you can tell by the width that it gets flood waters though here during the wet. The next cache up at Stuarts Well was a tricky one, but I did end up finding it, I had been through here before and since that time new info boards had been put up.
I found one more cache at a rest stop before AS, this one was damaged and was waterlogged, it needs better protection I guess! Then it was on to Alice where the kangaroos are enormous and bigger than cars apparently 🙂
I went back to the same camp ground where I had stayed before and erected my dodgy tent, one of the poles looks like it is about to snap already, and blew up my dodgy sleeping mat, I am not having much luck with sleeping arrangements lately! I had had no response from Swifty, but because he was working day shift, he may have been out of range. I met another rider here, he had a bike that had a different type of conversion, it looks like a trike, but it is actually a bolt on outrigger and he claims towing a trailer at speed is very stable with this rig 🙂
I grabbed a few beers and a feed from the local supermarket and had a quietish night, doing some blogging and catching up on the forums again. I was planning on staying a 2nd night, but I was unsure if it would be here or not, it depended on Swifty who I had still not been able to contact.
Day – 474 km and 295 miles
Trip –7,333 km and 4,557 miles
Cheers
TravellingStrom
WORLD 
TravellingStrom 