Getting Serious about Driving

We spent the night in Laverton, a small town on the edge of what we softies would call civilization. Beyond here be dragons, arrrgh!

The thing that was scary and uncertain about planning this trip was estimating the time between stops. The first two stops on the sign you see above are, in fact, the next two possible stops. Google Maps gives travel times between these stops as 7 or 8 hours but when I make an estimate based on a sensibly slow driving speed, I get 3-5 hours. How knows how long all this will take. What is the road like? Will there be mud or robbers? We don't know. It's a mystery. It's an adventure.



Something we see a lot (and you will too here on the blog) are abandoned cars along the road. Apparently, it is too hard/costly to get the car to a proper place but it is perfectly possible to get 50-60 meters off the road and strip it to bare metal. Go figure.

Drum roll please...here's the road. Nice, wide, dry, and very long. What is not immediately obvious is the corrugations. Look closely in the foreground. This is the enemy. At low speeds, your teeth rattle. At higher speeds it is nearly tolerable. At the wrong speed (whatever that turns out to be) is scary.

I let some of the air out of the tyres to soften the corrugations and it did seem to help. Surprisingly, after this three days of bone rattling vibrations at times (other times it was a smooth as glass) the ute still rode very quitely and smoothly on the sealed roads.