More broken stuff

Came down off Mitchell Plateau today. Contemplated going to the Surveyor’s Pool, but a 5km indistinct walk in turned us off. Also thought about Port Warrender, but the road notes for this says the last 8km takes two hours. Given that we get upset when 80km takes two hours, that lone got the flick as well. Kalumbaru would have been nice as well, but it was another 100km, and the road was said to “deteriorate”.

Perhaps I’m getting soft, but the roads and the distances have taken the edge off my desires for the moment.

Apparently our broken long-life milk was a common problem amongst travellers, so I don’t feel so bad about that one. The eggs that survived the trip up, I had hard boiled, and they got smashed up on the way down. The remote thermometer for the fridge gave us a scare, saying 42deg, but in fact it had only switched itself to Fahrenheit mode. I couldn’t for the life of me convince it to return to normal, so I pulled the batteries. That solved that problem, but now it has forgotten how to talk to the remote sender. I remember that you had to hold your mouth just right to fix that, but I’ve forgotten how. If someone wants to go to Evakool.com.au and look it up for me, that would be appreciated.

The power socket fell out of the inverter, so the netbook is only half charged, but fortunately it runs for hours, so no problem yet.

However, the biggie seems to be that I no longer seem to have any rear shock absorbers. I was a bit suspicious on the way down, as the road seemed to have gotten rather worse in two days. Then it started wagging its tail on corners and the soft stuff. Finally I was wondering why every floodway had six evenly spaced bumps coming out that I could never see. Stopping tonight I jumped on the towbar, and got three bumps. Not good. Harumph. Tomorrows problem, but I’d be surprised if there is anything to be done until civilisation. That’s about four days away.

Most of the driving today was over old roads. Only the last 90 minutes or so back on the Gibb River Road was new. Mostly open tall woodland with grassy understorey. Coming into Mount Barnett and Manning Gorge was a low range with the typical eroded escarpment and cliff face which was quite spectacular in the setting sun.