DAY 48 - GLADSTONE SA

GLADSTONE SA

DAY 48

AUBURN - GLADSTONE

109.22 km

Total Time: 08.00 – 16.45 (8h 45m)

Time on Bike: 6h 38m 59s

Max. Speed: 55.5 km/h

Av. Speed: 16.4 km/h

I’ve cycled 180 kilometres from Gawler yesterday morning.

Conservatively, 110 of these have been uphill and most of these 110 into a headwind.

180 km feels like about 300 right now. I’m quite buggered.

My advisors, in their well-meaning enthusiasm, neglected to mention that the trip from Gawler to Clare is 100 kilometres directly uphill.

And beyond this, there’s more of where that came from.

Beautiful countryside, but hard and exasperating work.

The alternative of course, was the traffic and truck laden Highway 1 – no particular scenery and just a little more dangerous.

At least I had the road to myself for great chunks of the trip today.

Gladstone is still over 100 km from Port Augusta and I’m taking my time over this.

It has started raining tonight and all hell is forecast for the next 3 days – electrical storms, hail stones, torrential downpours.

Tomorrow may be a good indoors day in this light and I need to do some laundry.

There is also a niggling physical problem I would like to rest up before pushing on.

I have a nice cheap camp and I can pretend to back in Flagstaff, Arizona for a day – there are enough Ponderosa’s to take me back and the Southern Flinders even have a few peaks over yonder to complete the resemblance.

No snow about worse luck, unless the hail stones come good. This may go close.

So I may not be riding for a while, or maybe I will.

There will still be a couple of stops before Augusta, then it will be fishing time as I hit the road down the Eyre Peninsula early next week.