Long straight

Today I left Balladonia to tackle the longest straight stretch of road in Australia. At 146.6km or 90 miles it is indeed a long straight. It doesn’t start until 40 or so kilometres from Balladonia and I was waiting for the obligatory photograph at the sign. There were roadworks though so after riding about 60km and not seeing a sign I realised that there wasn’t going to be one. At least not on this end.

My Japanese friend took a little longer than I to get going so I left him about 1 hour or so behind. As expected the wind wasn’t too accomodating but it wasn’t too full on either – at least not in the morning. Since Norseman I’ve been riding through the largest Eucalypt forest in the World which has been providing some shelter from the wind but at just about the point I realised that there would be no sign the trees suddenly stopped growing. One minute there are trees everywhere, the next just flat short grass with a few stubby bushes here and there – is this the Nullarbor before me!?

Around lunch time I came to a nice spot on the road with a few trees, so I stopped for a rest and some food. After cooking a hearty lunch I lay out on the grass and promptly fell asleep. Yukio woke me up a few hours later. At this stage the wind had picked up quite a bit and I decided I was done for the day so I stuck up my tent and went to bed early.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 4:45 pm by Ross and is filed under Australia, Western Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.