Get your motor running

Day 17. 26/9/11: Wilpena Pound to Arkaroo Rock

The view from our campsite at Rawnsley Bluff Caravan Park.
That's Rawnsley Bluff in the background.

It felt great to be back on the trail today. We were both feeling good. Recovered, mostly, after a day of rest and a day of walking. The section we covered today was short, compared to other days, at 16.5km, but we flew along. The ride was good, a lot of long down hills, about half bitumen - half fire access track (dirt road).

We saw an albino emu! I foolishly failed to take a photo, but it was pretty cool. A couple of other people had stopped their cars at the side of the road to have a look. They're quite rare I guess.

We left the bikes at Arkaroo Rock (which we'll take a side trip to tomorrow - we wanted to get back to camp earlier today because we'd been up during the night gathering all our stuff out of the rain, so had started a bit later than usual, plus we were moving camp sites from Wilpena to Rawnsley Park and needed to go shopping). The run back was lovely. My legs felt fresh and we did a solid 11kms an hour for the majority of the dirt track section.  I felt like I was really running!

Where the trail meets the main road.

Plus a few stumpy tailed lizards kept our hurdling skills up to scratch. They look at you with a 'what the hell are you doing?' expression as you jump over them, (I'm usually thinking 'eek! snake!' at the time, though). So the run/hurdling was great and only took us 1 hour 50.

My right hip plays me up sometimes on long walks - it was fine yesterday during the hike, but I guess it just caught up with me. During our walking sections today it started to get a bit iffy. On the walk back into camp it really hurt. A bit of arthritis cream (yes, really) seemed to help. It's a bit sore still, so I hope it'll be better by tomorrow. There's always something, eh?

The life.

What? I seem to be
in the way of a good photo!

We left Wilpena and drove into Hawker, a town we'd come through a week or so ago. It's the closest place with a food store. Not a great deal of choice - imagine your average camp site shop and that's about the range of food stuffs on offer. They did furnish me wth a lovely chocolate chip muffin and a damn good latte and an apple and cinnamon (and sultana) muffin and a choc milkshake for the big fella, though. We also found a bike hire place that had inner tubes to fit Tim's bike, with slime, which was a great success! 

We drove back north and we're camped at Rawnsley Park for the next two nights. We're about to head to a camp site presentation on the history and fossils of the Flinders Ranges! Cool!

A road.
Lily likes anything that is big and hard and drives in the bush.

Miraculous photo. Taken at 110km/hr, dead centre.
The ultimate capturing of the photo-opportunity presented by
a photo-opportunity sign! Awesome. Lily lost
her poker face completely and laughed her arse off!

Other hills. The track we rode is in the middle distance,
and the foreground, and the background. It's a long track.

Rawnsley Bluff. Not bluffing.

Ride

Time (hr:min:sec): 1:08:40

Speed (kph): 14.53

Distance (km): 16.63

Run

Time (hr:min:sec): 1:50:58

Speed (kph): 8.47

Distance (km): 15.66