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.

Woodgate camp site.

Arrived just before dark last night at the Burrum heads national park - Woodgate section. Here is photo of the camp site and the south from the beach to Harvey Bay. From the beach, about 100 m walk from camp, I get full optus 3G reception, so I've been able to post this to my blog. Who said national parks were in out of the way places. Going to explore the national park today, before heading off to see the oldies tomorrow.

Change of plan.

Carnarvon gorge was great but I'm now going to head to Woodgate and stay at the national park there for a few days. I'm having lunch in Moura, which is the first place I've had optus 3g connection since Roma.

Canvas Print

I just picked up a canvas print, I had ordered through big W's photo
section and it doesn't look too bad. The image is a mosaic, in the
shape of Austrlia, I had made from photos taken during my around Oz
trip in 2005. It turned out quite a bit bigger than I had expected as
I thought their size of 40 by 30 was in cm but it seems to have been
inches. When I ordered it there was a half price special so I am very
happy as it was just less than $100.