Hi there,
It’s Marc and Jessica again (I know right)!
We have finally arrived in the Outback! Although its hard to say exactly when we did so because for some reason the border of this huge expanse isn’t marked by a huge billboard saying “Welcome to Nowhere”, I am pretty sure when you can drive for 15 minutes and see nothing but 360 degrees of sweeping vistas of red dirt and shrubs streching to the horizon, dirt roads running off into the distance, and a huge double decker, triple trailer road train you are in the Outback (as far as I am concerned).
You may be wondering what prompted us to leave our lovely encampent at Port Augusta and push into the hinterlands, even though we were making promising gains with our electrical system (updates later). As we went to sleep last night, an ill wind started blowing and by the time we woke up, a storm was just starting to open up on us. Now, I am not a weather man so don’t quote me, but I do find it very suspicious that appearnce of this storm coincided exactly with the arrival of the team from across the bay in Port Augusta. Now, I am also not an oracle by profession, but it does seem that Stanford’s luck with the weather can only be viewed as an ill omen (so sad).
Jessica and I had some first world problems today, unfortunately while moving stuff around in Captain Blue Bear, the audio plug in my iPod was damaged preventing it from connecting to the AUX jack in the car. This lack of music, at a time when we are driving over some of the plainest country around is disheatening. We will survive though.
Another problem we had was that our can fish fell over and spilled in the car; our car now smells like fish. We cleaned it up but the stubborn smell refuses to go away. Sigh, we will live.
Regardless, we saw some interesting sights on our drive up. First we saw the town of Woomera, just off the main highway, which evidently was used as a rocket testing ground in the second half of the 20th century. The information center provided little info, so we quickly noted the location of the free BBQs in town, took some photos of Captain BlueBear with old rockets and hit the road again. On the way back to the Stuart highway, we ran into the rest of the team who had been caravaning up the road behind us, while we ran recon. That’s right, the Capt’n has leveled up from Scout to Reconnaissance (+3 mobility and +2 vision).
The second cool experience of the day, occured when we passed a triple road train during a paticularly strong bit of rain. The splash created by the passing of three huge trailer blocked our view of the road ahead and drenched our car like we were passing through a waterfall. Fortunately, as with the many previous times this had occured along our drives , albiet with smaller road trains, the automatic windshield wiper clicked on in a hurry whipped the water away (nice…).
We are currently in Cooper Pedy enjoying our last bits of internet access provided by Jessica’s wonderful library card. If you don’t hear from us, we are probably still alive, just without any internet. Another first world problem, what a day!