12/5/11

proper post for day 10

[lupine]
day 10 oodnadatta to coober pedy
great night at oodnadatta and an early start to coober p;edy.headed out along the painted desert road. the road out of oodnadatta is good, fast flowing dirt. a little loose in places but easy to hold a good speed on. we belted on down to the turn off for painted desert and headed in for a look. it was this road that almost proved to be our undoing. hammering along a really nice section road, skimming the occasionalshort shallow section of sand.these sections were few meters long and just a couple of centimeters deep. around a nice sweeping left handed into a dry creek bed that's a meter deep of loose soft rocky shaley sand. the whole road now follows this creek bed and Boo and i are tank slapping and bucking and about as close to binning it as we've come all trip. we fiinally manage to get slowed down enough to pull to a stop and we're both pretty shakey. we decide to pull over and have abreak but the sand is so soft it's really hard to get moving again and when we finally get over to the sid the stands just let the bike fall over. cock. pick it up and move it a bit to a place that won't fall over than go help boo sort out hers. we have a drink, empty our shorts and head off again. only now we have stopped it's almost impossible to get enoughspeed up to get smooth on the sand again so we endup wallowing and paddling the 2klm of the section until the road scomes out of the creek bed and goes back to normal. it was a bit of a wake up for us though and we kept the speed subsonic for the rest of the way to the painted desert hills. very pretty,but once again Boo got a lot more out of it than i since i'm, y'know, COLORBLIND!! why the hell am i going to all these scenic attractions that require good color vision to enjoy? why the fuck aren't i goingridingin the desert instead?
just one of the many questions that perplex me on this trip. but i'm having fun.
left painted desert and headed the rest of the way to coober pedy. got in at around 14:00 and went looking for an underground hotel.the information center in coober pedy is awesome and the girl working there soon found us a good cheap underground hotel and even called and made the booking for us. while we were there a guy in riding gear came in. he had not had a fun day. apparantly about 20 klm down the william creek road it turned to mud and his day turned to shit. he'd clogged his front guard 3 times before finallyjust taking it off and strapping it on the back of the bike. about 20 minutes later he turned around and came back to coober pedy instead. when brooke asked if he thought we'd be ok, he said sure, his problem was he was riding a triumph road bike that was built like a harley...
anyways, we went to the hotel and it was indeed underground. or to be accurate it was built into the side of a hill. great place, cool people who really liked having us, and the room was really cool. we took photos.
had pizza for the first time in ages at a pretty good place in town and then went back to go to sleep. great days riding though.

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