Day 4 - Desert Trip 2010

We slept in a bit in the underground camping site, then packed up and had brekky at the local servo. Brett and I had a look at the Coober Pedy Lookout before returning to the servo for a final fuel up. I included an extra 20 l jerry can of diesel just in case my fuel calculations didn't work out. We left about lunch time and headed to the start of the Anne Beadell highway where we dropped the tyre pressures a bit. The road started out not too bad but the corrugations gtot pretty bad all too soon. We ended up at Tallaringa Well for our first bush camp.

Day 3 - desert trip 2010

We slept in a bit at Port Augusta and after packing up we left the cara park just after 9 am. We did a bit of shopping at the local Woolies and refueld and left around 10ish. The drive to Coober Pedy was pretty flat and easy, fuel economy was much better today as we were generally heading north not west. We stopped off at few places to take photos and have a stretch. Got into town about 3ish in the arvo and after a quick drive down the main street we found the tourist info place. We checked into an underground camping place for the night, which was a couple of km out of town. Then it was back into town for a walk up and down the main street and dinner at the local pizza place. Then back to the camp site for a mine tour and then we went to bed early. The snoring was really resonating through the underground chambers, but it was much warmer than sleeping above ground.

Day 2 - Desert Trip 2010

We decided to change our trip to the great bakeries of Australia, as the sausage rolls from the Cobar bakery were sensational. It was another long days drive, 1050 km made worse by the fact we were driving into a pretty strong wind. Everyones fuel economy was bad but the V8 petrol Cruisers suffered more than my diesel pajero. We made it to Port Augusta for the evening and will head off to Coober Pedy in the morning.

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.