Friday & Saturday, 3 & 4 August 2007

Motel at Three Ways

Riding from Mount Isa to Three Ways

1:30am Friday

3:30pm Saturday (Central Time)

641

4,293

10,118

-150

638.8

24.58kph

Cool to cold nights, warm and sunny days.  Gusty southerly winds.

Big Brekky, sausage roll & ice-cream for brunch on Friday.  Big Brekky for breakfast on Saturday.  Pie and milkshake for lunch.  Roast of the Day for dinner.

At breakfast early on Saturday morning at Barkly Homestead Roadhouse I was chatting with a number of guys who turned out to be part of the film crew for the new Nichole Kidman/Baz Luhrmann movie “Australia” who were midway through moving all of the film gear from Byron Bay on the east coast to Kununurra on the north-west coast in a convoy of trucks.

Cycling right through a surreal Friday night out on a very dark, cold and windswept savannah with almost no other signs of life.

The last 100km into Three Ways was really hard work as I was exhausted.

I left Mount Isa reluctantly and with little motivation at 1:30am on Friday morning with the prospect of two long days in front of me.  It was cool and breezy with a slight headwind, but at least the winds weren’t as strong as yesterday afternoon.  The road climbed a bit, but then opened out onto a vast plain with occasional small rises and a creek crossing every so often.  The further I went the less tress there were and sometimes it just seemed to be brown grassland as far as the eye could see in any direction.
 
I made reasonable progress and reached Camooweal (189km), a stereotypical Australian outback town with some very run-down old buildings and stores, two roadhouses, a pub, a very wide main street, lots of vacant rubbish strewn vacant lots and a few dilapidated houses with bright red earth visible through the scant brown grass covering.
 
I had a breakfast at the roadhouse and then, as I was leaving still a bit hungry and realising I was not going to see another store until tomorrow morning, I returned to the roadhouse and bought a large sausage roll, and ice-cream and a big coffee milk.  I left about 1pm heading directly west back out onto the brown grassy plains.  After 12km I crossed the border from Queensland to the Northern Territory.
 
There was a cool strong crosswind.  I rode until about 5pm when I reached the Avon Downs Police Station, a small green oasis in the brown desert, and stopped in the rest area across the road.  I decided to have a 90 minute nap while the weather was still warm, before trying to ride through the night to the Barkly Homestead Roadhouse.  I found a concrete picnic bench and stretched out and had a fitful nap, before crossing the road to get a cup of coffee from the unmanned “Driver Reviver” (gold coin donation) stall outside the police station, and eating one of the pieces of carrot cake I had bought at Camooweal.
As the sun set, traffic became rare and I soon found myself battling the strong crosswind, zig-zagging across the road, in near complete darkness as clouds had now rolled in with the southerly change.  The night took on a surreal feel with me battling the elements, fatigue and the endless kilometres in the isolated darkness.  To break up the long haul (265km from Camooweal to Barkly) I began stopping briefly every 20km to have a snack and drink and just kept soldiering on in between.  Eventually, I rolled into the seemingly deserted Barkly Homestead Roadhouse at 3:00am and saw that it opened at 6:30am.  I wandered around and found my self a corner on the concrete flooring of the verandah where I was somewhat protected from the icy wind and had a sleep for three hours.  It was cold and I woke up shivering several times, but 3was tired enough to go back to sleep.
 
At opening time I went to the café and ordered breakfast along with a number of other chatty travellers.  They were very interested in my trip.  After stocking up on some more snacks and drink, I left at 8:00am for the 187km haul to Three Ways.  The wind was now predominantly a tailwind which made for fast initial progress, but I soon got tired and the last 100km, during which the wind often switched to cross/headwind was a long drag.
 
I got to Three Ways, the junction with the Stuart Highway (from Adelaide to Darwin), turned north and pulled into the Three Ways Roadhouse at 3:30pm where I got a motel room for the night.  I was in time to do a load of washing and look forward to a good night’s sleep and a relatively easy day tomorrow (242km to Elliott).