hmmmm - changing plans

hmmm so it seems my flexible job may not be so flexible and i'm going to have to work a couple of days into what i originally had planned as trip time - damnit! so a rejigging of destination is in mind....looks like now it will be home - adelaide - alice. to do the whole 3000k to darwin and back in the 13 days we have isn't quite going to work - so it will be just halfway - but i still get to go to uluru this way and can still have a sounds of silence dinner - yahoo!

time to get onto this rejigged planning - at least i'll have to carry less gear this way....

the lady who swallowed a fly

so annemaree sensibly suggested after my last post that perhaps ro and i could catch the ghan back to adelaide after riding the highway....seemed like a possible option and when you go to the ghan website you get this cool click-clacking noise of a train hitting the tracks and these pictures about how its a once in a lifetime train trip....so i was thinking, bugger the cost (coz its a bit more expensive than the vline cattle train i used to catch from warrnambool to melb) and did a bit more investigation.

but then i discovered that according to the people who put the vehicles on the ghan, that a motorbike is not a vehicle unless its on a trailer, and a trailer is not allowed to be by itself but must be attached to a car, and as i said to annemaree, i'm pretty sure there's a clause in there somewhere about having an old lady who swallowed a fly in the vehicle....

so it's no ghan for us and looks like we'll be riding back - possibly doing longer stretches of riding on the way home.


but in more nerdy book news, i bought the lonely planet guide to central australia today, complete with 62 maps. i'm going to nerd it up and memorise it later on tonight - now that's a whole bunch of happiness :)

some more thinking out loud

maybe this....
home - adelaide
adelaide -port augusta
port augusta - glendambo
glendambo - coober pedy
coober pedy - elrdunda
erldunda - uluru
uluru - alice springs
alice springs - tennant creek
tennant creek - daly waters
daly waters - katherine
katherine - darwin
and then home from there!
but will there be enough time to work our way up and then back? this is the question facing me today? hmmmmm planning must continue.....any thoughts?

thinking out loud....

Its been a couple of days since I've first posted and we've started telling a few people what we have planned for our holidays. You get a mixed reaction telling people you've decided to ride up the middle of our wide brown land. Some people respond with 'that's so cool, what an adventure!', while others go for the 'oh my god, you're probably going to die out there in the middle of nowhere, you'll get hit by a camel or a buffalo or a road truck. what if something goes wrong?' option. Personally I prefer the first option - its a little less depressing for one thing. But I haven't told my parents yet - and this is where the trouble may lie. Okay okay I may be 36 and old enough to make my own decisions but my mother has that quite common theory of 'your time is up when your time is up, but your time is up much quicker if you ride a motorbike'. My dad had been a bike rider for years and as a little tacker i spent loads of time in a sidecar wearing a helmet that was way too big for me. But he doesn't ride anymore and is a bit more worried about it than he used to be when he was younger. But there's no need to worry, I have st. christopher on my side! When ro and I went on our tea towel tour of tasmania, my mum decided that divine intervention was required and bought me a st.christopher medal- the patron saint of travellers. So i've got a little st.christopher medal, complete with its own glow in the dark halo and i keep this in the pocket of my bike jacket, where it exists quite happily and kept me safe all the way around tassie. It isn't however legal tender to buy a coffee with as I discovered when I dragged it out of my pocket instead of a gold coin. But I digress, I need to tell my parents of this trip. that is the crux of the matter.
So having decided to make this little road trip, preparations need to get underway....luckily for me, ro is a big-time hoarder and in the study we have all his old copies of road rider magazine and it was to bear that i turned first of all....I began by trawling through the mags finding state specials on s.a and the n.t and reading all the letters pages for other people who have done big trips as well. this could be a good thing or a bad thing and i'm sure its only a matter of time before ro decides which way it goes. When I read other people's letters this is when I start going 'can we take a spare clutch cable? what happens if ours goes in the middle of nowhere?' ro gives me that 'I'm a mechanic - hopefully I'd know before it happens' look and I keep reading, trying to find other possible emergencies that could eventuate and mentally planning how we might fit a spare engine into a backpack incase it gives up the ghost....

Being a book nerd, the mags are not enough for me and i go looking for hardcopy evidence that this trip can be done. then i find this link http://www.exploringaustralia.com.au/book.php?s=stuart which is an entire book dedicated to travelling the stuart highway from adelaide to darwin. Its on my to buy list and I look forward to snuggling up in my pj's with a cup of tea and my planning....

the beginning

So today it begins. I'd had this idea that we would go to Europe for their summer, but then I realised it was only about 10 weeks away, I hadn't booked flights, I hadn't saved that much cash and that I really couldn't be bothered going 'Oh look another ye olde building'. So I had a brainwave, typed it into google and next thing I had a little map showing me what melbourne to darwin on a motorbike would look like. That was it. That was all it took. I was sold.

But now the questions start:

'can we turn a streetfighter sports bike into a tourer that will take us 'up the guts' (as the colloquial expression goes) of Australia?'

'can we find panniers that are going to keep all our shit in place, while allowing ro (the head rider) and shaz (the chief passenger) to be in some comfort?'

'how much space will I have for jellybeans and freddo frogs?'

'how many days and how many stops?'

'will i get hit by a) a camel, b) a road truck c) a serial killer?'

'can i swim with crocodiles?'

you know all the burning issues and more. so this is how it begins. it will be about 17 days on a bike, at least 3 states, thousands of kilometres and a sore ass. before that comes the planning, the conversion from sports bike to outback tourer and the millions more questions i will pose.

stay tuned :)