Have a great time!
Your wife doesnot feel like driving ?

Enjoy your trip!!

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She does usually like riding, but this road will have a great deal of kilometers on dirt. And that she does not like.

Rob

Sounds Great. I look forward to hearing about it.

Thanks. A Sportster is not a touring bike of course - HD have a series of bigger bikes for that job.
But I like the agility of the Sportster, and have found that it will not even notice the 50kg of touring gear that I normally carry, and, having reached the destination, it all comes off in 6 minutes. Then the packmule becomes a quarter-horse again!

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I have travelled this route many times, but never by bike.
My Sportster is of course a genteel, city-guy, cruisish lollard by edict from the MoCo, but somewhere deep in it's gene pool it must have a racial memory of the Furious Fifties, when it ran the Jack Pine Rally, and the Santa Catalina Grand Prix.
So why not eat a little dirt now? So the gravel roads it was for us, and that meant Darwin via Windorah and Birdsville.
So the leaving of Queensland's long narrow and bumpy sealed roads was to end at Windorah, before facing the even worse gravel roads.
And in Windorah, there was a number of things to be done.
First, post home about 15 hundredweight of clothing that I should have never brought in the first place.
Second; buy some fuel from a blind man. As you do.
Yes, the gentleman was definitely blind, he finally admitted as much, but not until we had gone through a to-and-

Sorry about the last entry. I think that this small slow e-machine computer does not like fast impatient typists.

Anyway: the blind console operator: I think that he never gets cheated.
Because his customers are either locals, who would watch each other like hawks; or tourers like me. And we would not cheat him either. Just because.

Rob

27.7.11.
Wild camped beside the road for the first time in years, and sure eniough, a rat came by and ate a hole through the bottom of my plastic cup. Ignoring, on the way, two Uncle Toby's Muselie Bars, and a cask of half - decent Yalumba Reisling.
Not sure what this tells us about rodent discrimination...

Arrival in Birdsville early on the 28th, hoping to find hotel or motel accomodation. No chance, this is High Season in the outback, and the little town was jam-packed with Grey Nomads, who had arrived in 4 by 4s, or by air, as apprpriate to factors like affluence and relative decrepitude.

Not that I scorn other people's modes of travel, as I am/have been both bushdriver and aviator. But the population crush put me back under canvas again for the coming night. Ah well. I have slept worse.

But after the mandatory photoshoot outside the pub, I went in to find food and and was immediately fined for using a cell-phone in the bar! (All in fun. The proceeds go to the Royal Flying Doctor Service)

And while in there, I met with a group of dusty Kiwi adventure riders on Suzuki DR, BMW and KTMs, who were competing in a rally run by an Australian property development company. Apparently, the ride details are on ADV rider, but I have not checked.

The company had organised for contestants to start from numerous points around the country and navigate via GPS co ordinates, with position reporting via SPOT satellite tracking.

Hard men to be sure. And as I pointed out to them, a group who would have to return on another occasion and ride the same tracks again, next time looking at the country, instead of constant high speed blasting.

"Oh? you arrived in Birdsville from the South? That would have been on the Birdsville Track fom Marree, right?"

"Ah, yeah, I suppose so"

"Did you see Tom Kruse's Outback Mailrun Truck? The Lake Eyre Sailing Club? Australia's oldest, oudoor mosque,as used by the Afghan cameleers in the 1800s?"

"Er no"

Ah well I'm only jealous that I can longer ride so hard and fast....

Rob