From Dark To Dark

Heading out of Mebourne as the sun came up.

Tire trouble!

A soda lake and a strange large thistle.

Farm fields full of dried grass.

Saturday, April, 2^nd.

I got up as soon as the wake up announcement woke me up. I had a lite breakfast and then got ready to disembark. It was still dark as I drove off the boat. My GPS didn't recognize any town in Southern Australia, like Coober Pedy, or Alice Springs so I finally entered Adelaide in order to navigate out of Melbourne. We (the GPS and I) got lost on the freeway again and I had to turn around, but I finally made it out.

Once we got out of the suburbs the scenery was nice, with gum trees in very dry fields. I cruised along for 300 kms at the highway speed of 110 until I heard a loud thumping sound, like I'd run over something. I looked in the rearview mirror and didn't see anything, so I pulled over figuring I had a flat, but everything looked okay. But when I started to accelerate again there was obviously a problem, so I stopped again. This time I noticed that a large piece of the tread had come off the rear right side tire. I didn't want to change it with the spare, so I decided to drive slower to the next town which was 12 km away. Luckily there was little traffic and this town was considerably larger than the ones I had been passing. I stopped at a service station and they directed me to a tire shop just down the road. The technician looked at the tire and said he couldn't believe it was still holding air. He examined the other tires and told me the other back tire was old and worn too. So, I decided to replace both. He rotated the Pirellis from the front to the back and put the two new ones on the front. What could have been a disaster was solved in less than an hour. My confidence was shaken a bit, but I decided to continue on.

I was very lucky. Every once in a while the thought crossed my mind what would happen if I had car trouble in Tasmania and maybe couldn't make the ferry. That would put the rest of the vacation in jeopardy. Lucky too that it happened in the more populated area of South Australia and only a few kilometres from a main town. Also that it didn't go flat. And if it had happened after Adelaide in the more remote areas it would have been harder to fix.

I spent the rest of the day driving. I have a reservation in Coober Pedy for Sunday night, so I wanted to get as close to there as possible so that I can spend some time in the town. So I drove from dark to dark, twelve hours and 1056 kms.

It was 740 kms of rural farms to Adelaide, and then a 10 km steep decline into the city. Trucks were warned about it for a long time. I didn't want to go right into the city because I knew that Coober Pedy was north of Adelaide, so I got off and asked for directions at a gas station and headed out. I wasn't really sure, so I tried the GPS again, and low and behold Coober Pedy came up this time and it guided me out of the city.

What a difference a day makes, yesterday I was driving around Tasmania with its narrow, winding, hilly roads, through lush forests and fields lucky to be able to do the speed limit and today I raced along a wide straight mostly flat highway at 110 km past vast open dry fields.

Here they have 'average speed' traps. There are two cameras a few kilometres apart and they calculate your speed based on how long it took you to get there. Actually a much more fair way of ticketing you and a better way to keep speeders honest. Luckily my GPS warns me of them. Australia is very speed conscious. They have lots of signs that say things like: 'speeding shatters lives', with a picture of a broken spine. They also warn drivers continually about taking rests with signs like: 'survive the drive', and 'drowsy drivers die'.

I drove for 300 kms north of Adelaide to Port Augusta (all the towns near here are called Port something, yet we are on the edge of the outback, weird). Once I got out of the suburbs of Adelaide the scenery was again lovely. It is very dry and everything looks brownish. The colours of the fields, the hills and the sky are all pastel. I stopped by a soda lake which was a turquoise colour with pinkish shores. I wonder if flamingos come here. There were some really large thistle type weeds there.

When I got to Port Augusta I found a divey little motel, checked in and got ready for bed. I'm tired and I want to get an early start tomorrow.

Okay, I just checked Google Maps and it turns out that there is a large inlet west of Adelaide and the highway I was on runs north alongside it. All the towns I passed are on that inlet, even though nowhere along the route could I see the water, and that's why they are all called ports.