29 August 2016

This is not posted a day late, not because of a pub visit, but we had no internet access.

Today was an absolutely wonderful day.....NOT!!!!!

We though yesterday was bad, and we whinged, and today ended up even worse.

The rain kind of let up, for minutes at a time, and the sun even managed to come out a little, but the entire day was wet, bitter and cold.

We left Ravensthorpe, heading towards Denmark (both of us wishing we had our passports with us, so we could actually fly to Denmark, just to avoid the rain).

This area has had so much rain in the past couple of days, that the road shoulders were filled with water, and not only that, we came across a "water on road" sign. Nothing out of the ordinary with that.......no everywhere has water on the road. Sure, but everywhere else it is not a raging torrent that literally went halfway up our bike tires (well Sandra's tires anyway, The Vespa tires were fully submerged, as they are so small),  and Jerry would have floated off down the river if it wasn't the ocky straps. By the time we crossed, even our bums were wet.

We both know that this isn't the best thing for the bikes, but it was either that, or camp in the rivers of water for the next week, until they subside.

One huge difference that we both noted between here and our side of the country, is that here the rest stops and access to a lot of the service stations, are on dirt roads. For nine and a half years out of ten this would not be a problem, but of course we chose to come in that half a year every decade that these dirt tracks, are extremely muddy waterlogged skidpans, that to most would only be 4WD accessible, and we were not willing to risk. So we even stopped near one of these turnoff to a petrol station, and Marica used Jerry to fill up.

We were so wet and cold that at another petrol station the owner saw us struggling to put on our gloves, that he took us into his own home, and let us use his daughters hairdryer, to semi dry them so that we could put them back on.

When we got to Denmark, we went to the first campsite we saw, got a cabin and sat there with the heater on, to try and defrost our bones, and dry all of our gear ready for tomorrow.