Day 1 finished up at Nyngan

I left the coast at 5 am and met up with brett and leon in Aratula at 7 am. It was wet for most of the morning but cleared up after lunch. The photo is from Narabri where we found a very bakery. We've set up camp in a shed at the caravan park in Nyngan as the ground is pretty wet. We've had dinner at the RSL and we're hoping to watch the rugby soon. I ended up doing just over 1000 kms today and we'll have to do the same tomorrow.

Desert Trip Part 2

As well as generating a GPS route of my upcoming desert trip I'm also testing out a way to keep a daily diary that can then be emailed to my blog when I get into a town with Optus network connectivity. I'll try and write up what happens each day using Outlook Express on my Netbook and choose to send later. Hopefully, then when I get to an Optus area I can then just Send All and they will get emailed out in the order they were written. Otherwise I'll need to save each one as a draft and then send them myself in order, but that would be a bit tedious.I took the .gpx file I generated using Basecamp and converted it into a .kml file suitable for Google Earth and used that to generate this image showing our upcoming trek.

Desert Trip Test 1, html encoding

I spent a bit of time yesterday generating a gps route for my upcoming desert trip in August. I used Basecamp on my mac to plan the route using a combination of two different maps, firstly for the bitumen roads I used Garmin City Navigator and then for the more obscure roads I used shonky maps. Some of tracks can be seen in paper maps (Hema's Great Desert Tracks) but don't show up in the digital maps I had available, so I had to improvise a bit at times. In this post I have attached an image of the final result as displayed in Basecamp.

Ironman awning

I had an awning fitted to the pajero through the week to provide a bit of shade while camping. I went for a bit of a drive to find somewhere a bit isolated so I could try and set it up without embarassing myself too much. All went pretty well, although it is a bit bulky, it would be much easier with two people. After a few weeks of setting it up on my upcoming desert trip, I should have the hang of it. Taking it down and packing it up is much easier than I thought.