Drive home

Hi All – I just thought I’d write a quick message before we leave from Gympie to drive back home.
I’d say this leg of the journey is going to be a fairly nothing experience so I don’t imagine there is going to be any updates. I will however post a wealth of photos and videos once I get a chance to compile it all at home.

Thanks for coming along for the ride, we hope you’ll be along on our next adventure… Two Magadan.
It’s a great feeling knowing people are coming along for the ride and that we have something to share.

Talk to you all soon.

Graeme

Back on the mainland

We’re relaxing in a motel in Gympie, reflecting on our awesome day on Fraser Island. It started out at just after 5am local QLD time and Graeme and I were literally the only people on the beach. It was just beautiful. We felt like we had the whole island to ourselves. It was really cloudy out there today and actually started to rain as we were heading back to the barge pick up point. Here’s a picture of the beautiful stormy sky…

The tide started to come in again as we were driving along so I drove off the beach and onto a track that led us into a rain forest setting.It was an awesome little 4WD track and the scenery was absolutely beautiful. It led us to one of the inland, freshwater lakes on the island (lake Garawongera). I threw the keys to Graeme – I guess I had to give him a chance to drive too! – and we set off to continue up the down the track back to the beach. We came to the one wet, soggy patch on the track and promptly sunk like a stone! Totally bogged in sludgy quicksand. I was so worried to begin with because I had noticed that no cars seemed to be driving the same way that we were, everyone was heading towards the other end of the island. I had these silly, unfounded thoughts of us being the only ones at the north end of the island and having to hoof it to the other end to get help. Anyways, drama queen moment over, we got out our whole arsenal of recovery equipment and set to work. Thanks Jay and Corley for the exhaust jack – that was one of the first things we tried! Unfortunately, either the car was too low (it was beach as!) and we couldn’t dig out enough ground to get the bag under the car enough, or we’re totally crap at using the exhaust jack, because it didn’t help us in this instance. Graeme is pretty sure our exhaust leaks, so we were not sure we were building the required pressure. So we tried the Max Trax, then ended up rigging up a winch with the high lift jack. Just as we were doing that, I heard a car coming down the track towards us to ran along the track before they had a chance to turn off. Just as the tourist in a huge Ford F250 came round the bend, Graeme had winched the car onto the max trax and drove out! That’s my man! Anyways, the other guy decided (With plenty of persuasion from Graeme) to see if he could get through the boggy section while we were still there, and yes, he sunk like a stone too. Luckily we stuck around and were able to pull the car out of the bog. All good fun. Here’s a pic of us totally stuck… We’ll be putting together all of our videos when we get home in a few days. As a bit of a teaser, we have video of us going in, and pulling the F250 back out.

Here are some more photos:

Some guy couldn’t wait for the tide to go down a bit more
Our barge to take us home… absolutely sideways on approach but hooked it right at the last moment.

There are more photos, but this fail laptop just can’t take any more for tonight.

Fraser Island

Wow – I can’t believe we’re actually here. It’s been a childhood dream for years. I’ve planned numerous times over the years, but it just never happened.

Although we have ‘EDGE’ wireless broadband, it doesn’t seem strong enough to get this post out, so you’ll be reading this tomorrow. From about mid day today, we ran the spot in ‘Tracking’ mode, so you should have a nice map of how we got here at 10 minute intervals.

  Throughout our drive there was plenty of evidence of recently subsided water, but I must say, our route was perfect, circumventing all of the trouble spots. This picture to the left is of a water height post… that’s 13 and 14 metres, not 130-140 centimetres.

We bought our barge pass at 16:15 but were informed by the useless girl at the service station (after completing half the process of buying our barge pass) that she could not process our order for our camping and vehicle pass. She said the website was down and to go up the road to the National Parks office… it closed at 16:00…. thanks.

We tried to call the 13 number but no Vodafone coverage, but could get internets at Inskip point. The website was broken… at the very end of the process of ordering the pass. When I tried to ask the barge skipper as to what we do, he just barked over the PA to get the car on the barge. It was their last run tonight and we were no doubt an inconvenience. Oh well, here we go. So before we knew it, we were half way across the water with an interesting floating sensation… in the car. Kind of like driving across a river that is too deep and you start floating down stream!
1st Photo – looking back towards Inskip point
2nd Photo – Looking forward we were one of two cars on the Barge. The other was full of people drinking…
3rd Photo – Just landed, drove down the beach and took a photo.
4th Photo – the rubbish inland road, wow, it was terrible. The roughest road ever that wasn’t a fire trail – with a 50kph speed limit. It’s not the sand, it’s a gravel road.
5th Photo – Our camp for tonight at Dilli Village

I tried to call Mum to see how her birthday was but the phone is out of order.
We’ll try get down on the beach to post this tomorrow.
We were sitting at dinner with a weird feeling… where too from now? We didn’t plan this visit, and we certainly didn’t plan a route along the coast. I imagine we will be basking in the modern luxuries that the coast has to offer.

Chris, would welcome some ideas for cool things to check out? It’s probably going to be too late by the time we get replies. I’m not sure if we’re here tomorrow night.

Love Graeme (oh and Cassie too)

PS. this post was uploaded waiting for tide so we can get to the barge to take us back to the motherland.

Boring Update

We don’t have any interesting pictures to share or anything. It’s just been a day of driving. We have managed to circumvent all the flooded areas so far.

I’m not sure why, but our most recent spot message had not been delivered. We’re at a truck stop outside of Morven, QLD: Latitude :-26.41183 Longitude :147.12711

Just in case you didn’t notice, you can get to the spot messages on the left at any stage. It only retains the last 7 days. I’ll be putting more stuff in the left column.
We’ve done 865KM today, and was totally boring, but nice to get some distance behind us. It’s nice to come into towns that are not filthy. With any luck we’ll be by the water tomorrow at either Hervey Bay or Inskip point.

It’s come to our attention that most people didn’t know how to post comments on our blog.
-Click on the little ‘0 comments’ section at the bottom of the post you wish to comment on.
-Make your comments (and put a little comment as to who you are)
-Where it has ‘choose profile’ just choose ‘Anonymous’
Look forward to seeing more come through.

We’re considering going over and getting an ice-cream and then going to sleep.
In the interest of saving my sanity and disk space, Below I have posted a video and picture from Alice Springs, excuse the quality, when we went out to dinner we only had my camera phone.

Sorry, the half megabyte video wand photo won’t upload. omg this laptop is going to be crushed very soon…

Update… here they are:

 

Graeme’s Post

 
It’s always nice to start out with a nice photo – well, the photo is rubbish, but the car was worthy of a picture.
See how many different cars you can spot. I think there is at least 6 bits of car there!

Like most evenings on the road, I’m sitting watching the sun go down as I write this. What a life! So far the sun sets have been the best part of this trip. I was looking in awe at a map of Australia in the back of our touring atlas. We have covered so much distance it’s scary. Initially I was worried the car wouldn’t make it, but we’ve calculated we’ve done 5000KM. Hell, we did 800KM yesterday. It certainly doesn’t sound like much distance for a car (considering you service them every 10000-15000KM), but it’s really settled down and works great. Thinking about it, it’s unlikely the car has changed, but more our perception and tolerances. I’ve certainly narrowed down the noise the the drive shaft moving in the hub. I wish I could upload the video to explain how it looks and sounds. No idea how or why that might happen, but it’s fine, it’s only a noise when idling around occasional bumpy corners. It’s not going to pose a problem.
 

Tiny micro towns – what can I say. Cassie is far more vocal on this topic, but I really resent having to stop in these places. There seems to be no pride, no employment, no future for these towns. This unpowered rest stop has 3 times the facilities of the last town we passed through!  Maybe I’m just tired, we had a rubbish sleep last night. On the upside, we’re considering going to Fraser Island. We’re not super certain we will, but it seems a waste to just to head back inland when the coast route will be more interesting. We won’t make it tomorrow, but we’ll start to hit decent towns at least.

We have made a list of things to improve upon before our next trip. So far the list looks like this:
-Angle the drawer lock bolts to 45’ so that the bolts don’t vibrate out while driving. Currently they are horizontal.
-Permanent flyscreens.
-Tinting for privacy and reducing sun temp.
-Remove a centimetre or two from the top of the high drawer. This will make it easier to pull, and able to lock out like the rest.
-Dual batteries – It was a given, I now accept this is the best way forward. I’m sick of considering the temperature of the fridge if we leave the car for too long.*
-Make permanent the wiring for fridge, laptop charger, screen power & inverter. A nice fuse block/switch panel will do nicely.
-Toying with the idea of moving the laptop to the passenger side, rather than the common screen & laptop combination. This has several advantages:
1) Allows better entry of data while travelling without having to use on-screen-keyboard via touch screen.
2) Opens up the centre section of the dash allowing use of the middle vents and the instrument cluster that is currently covered (Oil pressure & battery state)
3) Looks more factory – sick of people asking why I have a ‘TV’ in my car.
4) Simplifies the docking & undocking when we want to take the laptop out of the car.
5) Frees up the space for something else.

-Buy another head torch.
-Consider better access to fresh water, currently we siphon from larger 20L jerry cans into 1-2L bottles.
-Invest in a small fold up table or devise a way to use some other flat surface we have (Such as the bed base)

 

*Currently we have somewhat of a dual battery in the form of an accessory jump pack, which gets charged off the car battery, but runs the fridge for a few hours until we run the car again. We want days of capacity, not hours.

 

 

Laptop is reaching it’s life…

-USB ports drop out (annoying when using broadband, or copying photos as it drops out roughly every 3 minutes)
-Car charger has is broken in two places (have been running the 240v power pack on the inverter)
-Screen bends over in the wind
-It’s out of disk space
-Doesn’t have grunt to play videos (let alone edit them)
-On the upside, it’s battery life is fantastic.

Simply Marbellous

Yes, marbellous and not marvellous. We took the Stuart and Barkley Hwys heading to Mt Isa via Camooweal from Alice Springs yesterday and came across the awesome Devils Marbles. What a treat they were. Absolutely amazing and I have no idea how those massive boulders are balanced one on top of the other – literally looking like marbles.

 

 

 

We also came across Wycliffe Well – a town that claims to be the “UFO Centre of Australia”. Hmmm. Anyways, a very weird place. Didn’t stop very long because as usual, the “town” was just an overpriced fuel station and caravan park (and in this instance a UFO/alien museum of sorts). I did take a picture of Graeme with some of the locals…

 

 

 

 

 

We drove through a storm yesterday which, due to the very flat land, we could see tens of kilometres away. There was impressive thunder and lightening and finally the rain. All of which we were only involved in for less than a few minutes, but it did provide us with some entertainment on an otherwise fairly boring drive. In the picture of the storm when it was ahead of us in the distance, you can see that it was literally split into two. One side of it on the left of the road, and the other on the right. Stunning.

 

 

We got to west of Camooweal and camped out for the night in a beautiful spot. Here’s a picture of the amazing sunset we were treated to whilst eating our dinner of beef rogan josh with rice.

Unfortunately, the temperature didn’t drop very much overnight and with no breeze to speak of it was sweltering hot – above 30 degrees in the car. After a little while of trying desperately to get to sleep, we realised that it was absolutely futile and decided to drive a little way down the highway with the air con running at full blast until the temperature in the car dropped. We did manage to get a few hours sleep and were up again at dawn and set off straight away, again with the air con at full blast, until we reached another rest stop to have some breakkie.

It’s great to be heading east again!

Till next time, Cassie

PS: My experiences with outback toilets reached a new low today. I reckon a wasp nest, yes very much filled with live wasps, clinging to the underside of the cistern was the worst experience to date. Made worse still by the fact that I was unaware of it at first wondering where on earth that lone wasp had come from. I ended up running out of there looking as if someone had set my butt on fire!

A time to relax

Hi Everyone! Graeme’s been doing all of the blog writing the last few days, so I thought it’s about time I wrote a thing or two.

After a week’s travel of roughing it in the heat, we’ve been staying at a motel in Alice Springs since arriving here yesterday evening – aahhh the relief to be walking on carpet in bare feet and having a shower whenever I darn well want to and not having bugs and mozzies hanging around us! I don’t do bugs! I’ve been taking FULL advantage of the shower, laundry facilities, air conditioning and tv since we arrived!! I know you all probably don’t want to hear this, but it’s been a relief to go to the loo and not have to share it with a bazillion spiders, flies, moths and dust that is inevitable in the rest stops in the outback. Not that I was under this illusion to begin with, but just to let everyone know who perhaps is thinking this, the outback is not the romantic place the brochures make it out to be. It’s full of flies, bugs, dust, lizards (these are cool), weird centipede things, mice!, ants, HUGE spiders and a level of “cleaniless” that is not as per the definition in any dictionary I know of – everything’s filthy. Oh, and you can’t drink any of the water because it’s salty, stinky bore water. Thank goodness for our 40 litres of drinkable water!

Just to fill you in on a couple of things that Graeme’s written about previously, we didn’t end up getting the tyre fixed in William Creek because the tyre repair guy (who is also the guy in the pub, the pilot for the area and the garbage guy among many other jobs for the place), got called out to a plane crash in the area. Thankfully we heard on the local radio the next day that the victims survived relatively unscathed. Due to the extreme heat and the fact that we had no reliable spare tyre and no certainty that Oodnadatta would have a tyre repairer, we decided the best thing to do was to get off the dirt roads. We also felt that not being pub people we weren’t excited to drive a long way to another “outback pub” which really stands for “extremely overpriced drinks and fuel with the promised scent of sweat and cow dung in the air” – it felt like driving dirt for dirt’s sake. So, we got up at dawn and travelled back towards the Stuart Hwy to Coober Pedy. There we found a tyre place where the guy showed us that the tyre was not repairable, so we bought a new one and he balanced our front left wheel for us while he was at it.

Another thing I wanted to point out is that we did actually pay more than 189.9 cents/L for fuel. We paid 199.9 cents per litre at Mt Ebenezer on the way to Uluru yesterday!! Needless to say we only put in as little as we could and then drained the 10L we had in the jerry can to top it up. Yikes, I’ll never complain about $1.30/L for fuel in Canberra again!

Today has been a wonderful day of doing absolutely nothing but bludging and I’m not ashamed to admit that. It’s been an absolute treat and exactly what we needed to refuel ourselves and not the car for once. Alice Springs is an interesting town to say the least. Unfortunately due to the Christmas/New Year’s period practically everything is closed so I don’t think we’re experiencing the town in full swing.

Tomorrow we’re checking out, filling up the fuel tank again and heading further north to Mt Isa. Thanks to Warren for the advice on the roads to take. From there we’ll have to check with the locals to find out what the flood situation in QLD is like so that we can figure out which way we go to get back into NSW. We’re hoping to go to Cameron Corner which is the point where the NSW, QLD and SA borders meet. But, we’ll see how we go. Either the floods, road conditions or our mood will determine whether we end up going or not.

It’s been a real adventure so far and we’ve had many experiences that I’m looking forward to sharing with everyone and anyone who wants to listen to me babble on!

Thanks everyone for your comments on our blog. It’s so lovely to hear from people at home. I hope you all had fun with New Year’s Eve  last night. Happy New Year to you all and cheers to a great year ahead!

Take care, Cassie

PS: Here are some random photos of our travels so far…

A “portrait” of an emu at a fuel station we stopped at on the Stuart Hwy. They make the weirdest sound – like someone tapping on a drum. Not the smartest birds on the planet either.

 

 

 

 

Here’s a picture of a centipede thing that meandered on the ground around us at our camp near Leigh Creek. Have no idea if it’s poisonous or if it even bites, but I certainly wasn’t wanting to find out. He did have bright red legs which aren’t really showing up in any photos we have of it. It did look pretty cool.

 

 

 

We’ve been treated to some beautiful sunsets and sunrises.

Some videos & photos

Below are some photos from Coober Pedy – My ‘gold digger’ brother would love this place:

http://picasaweb.google.com/twomagadan/20101230?authkey=Gv1sRgCLzyirfaiPjwoAE#