Roadside Kitsch – Finally We have now ridden over 3000 miles in three states in Australia and never once seen a stupid corny “roadside attraction” … until today. If we had driven 3000 miles around America, I can guarantee we would have seen a statue of Paul Bunyan with an axe, or a man made …
Tag Archives: E65OZ19
Rocket Men in Woomera Woomera is the location of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) base that supervises the missile test range that was setup jointly with the RAF after the Second World War. Initially it was over 100,000 square miles – the area of New Zealand or Colorado – but now it’s half that …
From Quorn to Adelaide – A Ride Through Science and Time In 1865, George Goyder the Surveyor-General of South Australia rode over 3000 Km to develop a map that would help farmers decide where they could plant crops. He drew a line across the colony that roughly corresponded to 10 inches of rain per year …
From Greece to Coober Pedy Coober Pedy is the largest opal mining area in the world and provides most of the world’s gem quality opals. The town is clearly past its peak, however, and most of the town’s businesses seem to cater to tourists looking for boomerangs and didgeridoos rather than opals. Most of the …
How Do You Define the Outback? We have asked people along the way how we’ll know we are in the “outback” and nobody has provided us with anything like a clear definition. The other day one chap said “Well, it’s not an exact science is it mate? It’s where the bitumen ends and nobody lives …
You Know You are in the Middle of Nowhere … … when You are 267 Kilometers to Nowhere. Reginald Sprigg was an Australian geologist who made two huge impacts in his life. First he discovered fossils in 1946 that established proof of the first animals that helped date and explain the Cambrian Explosion – the …
Warn Them or Film Them? A question for my adventure bike riding friends. If you come to a very difficult section of track well ahead of your riding buddies, do you a) warn them or b) film them? You know, just in case. Well Bill Whitacre chose option b). Thanks Bill. This is part of …
What Wine Goes With Emu? We continue to meet the nicest people everywhere we go in Australia. We are rapidly coming to the conclusion that ALL Aussies are nice. Stopping for breakfast in Wilpena Pound – a beautiful amphitheatre of mountains in the middle of the Flinders Ranges where we had camped the night before …
Camels For Export This morning chatting to a bloke at the petrol station, I asked him what he was doing in Copley. He told me he was driving a load of camels to the abattoir in Peterborough, South Australia but he’d broken down. Not an answer I was expecting. Camels and their Afghan handlers were …
Kangaroo Carnage After you get over the initial delight in seeing so many kangaroos in the wild, bouncing in the sand and peeking at you over the bushes, you soon begin to realize something is wrong. New South Wales has been suffering drought conditions for over six months. We have seen Road Train loads of …
Colin's Travel Journal 