Bruce, Simmo and Heidi trip and live travel map

[Heidi1]

Hey Missy, while I was standing in the driveway of the bottle shop, I got two offers of beds for the night. When Simmo and Bruce turned up the offers dried up. Go figure.

I sent Bruce back in this time to swap it for a 5 litre one, which took two trips and then as we were leaving we realised we has stolen a funnel thing (technical term from the boys).

From Ayr we went to Townsville then we found a road called the Herveys Range Development Road which was absolutely beautiful. Big clean sweepers up and over the mountain with a brilliant road surface. There was a military base half way up which may explain the money spent on the road quality. Which left us completely unprepared for the Gregory Development Road. After the Herveys Road, we were perilously low of fuel. We hadn't really factored in the fuel we were going to use at that pace. Turning right, onto the Gregory's Developent Road, Bruce was leading on a TINY piece of tar that wasn't a single lane wide and big red dirt runoffs either side. I've seen these kind of roads in movies and in pictures, so it was kind of exciting to see a real one. As I was admiring the view, a MASSIVE cloud of dust dragging four dog trailers approached us at high speed with absolute confidence in the fact that he owned the bitumen.





We've had a chat about we all did, Bruce was forced off into the scrub, Simmo reckons he wasn't scared and stayed on the tar (Bruce and I think that is BULLSHIT), and I think I closed my eyes and hoped for the best. The trailer was empty, so the tail was whipping side to side like a tail wagging a dog. After that, we all needed a quick cigarette and a chat, so we continued at a very sedate 80kms/hr. After our confidence grew we were doing it at 120 then much higher. We weren't scared and we weren't giving an inch, this is BUSA COUNTRY!



Bruce and I had given Simmo the slip using a large multi-bodied truck as a distracter, and were fanging along the development road when we both saw a line of vehicles. We'd both assumed it was a road crew, so we were completely surprised by a man with a stop sign that all but leapt out and belted Bruce with it.



We spent the rest of the day dodging the massive road trains and grey nomads on the development roads. It was obvious we weren't going to make the 1200kms goal AGAIN (we are falling behind).

We were headed for Karumba, but at 6pm we were in Georgetown, still over 300kms from our destination, when Bruce came up with a brilliant idea, 'let's find ourselves a spot, buy a few snags and camp for the night!'. Simmo and I were highly suspicious of such an idea, but five minutes on the dark road with bloody CATTLE wandering around and brain dead roos with a suicide wish was enought to convince us. We drove slowly along another road and as I'm sure you remember from the last post, it was Simmo's turn to pick the accomodation. After a few false starts, Simmo found a spot where the grader had recently gone through leaving a large area of soft red dirt. PERFECT. We pulled over and prepared to drop the massive Hayabusas down the steep, soft shoulder. I don't know if any of you people have ever seen a Hayabusa, but they are a bloody big bike, it was a steep descent and they aren't really all that good on dirt. None of these things were considered! The grader has left a second hump of soft dirt just off te shoulder that must have been desigend to catch a bikes front wheel, Bruce rode his down with a flourish and I pulled up on the dirt shoulder. We shall let Bruce describe the results because I am too sad.