Waking up in a bed was a bit of a treat, dad an I walked down and had the truckers big Breakfast at the pub. Before we headed out of town today I had a few tasks to do. The first was to get some camp food staples, we headed into the Windorah store and I bought flour, milk powder, butter and of course red frog lollies. I also got a yabby net so I could try my luck later in the day.
Something I have done in almost every town is send Ngaio a letter with something special from the desert so my second task was to do that! After that it was time to set off, just out of town there was a huge solar farm. They looked like massive satellite dishes covered in reflective solar panels, i stoped to take a photo and realized dad was about 200m behind pushing his bike...he had a flat tire. I am so over fixing that bike! One of the big challenges for me on this journey had been dealing with two bikes and the problems that come with them. Because the other bike has pretty much only had beginers on it, it is close to everything breaking. The gears at the back are missing teeth and the tires are almost completely worn through. I filled the inner tube with self sealing tire goo, we pumped it back up and kept on moving.
We only had a short day on the bikes today, we were headed to Cooper creek. All up we traveled along the road for 12 kilometres, it only an hour to reach the narrow bridge that crosses over the creek. I decided we should find a spot along the eastern river bank so we turned off and headed down a rough track. We must of followed the track for around 2km before stopping and setting up our camp under the shade of a bunch of juvenile river red gum trees. I thought I would try my luck at Yabbing so I set up the Yabbi pot, baited it then launched it out into the river. Apparently it’s a bit of a waiting game so I headed back to the tent and painted a picture in my journal.
As the day got hotter I decided to go for a bit of an exploratory walk up the river to see if I could find anything cool. While I was doing this dad was relaxing in the sun next to the river. I grabbed my waterbottel and started walking, i only made it 200m before the river bank became too steep to walk along but I did find a turtle shell that had dried out and cracked in the sun. On my way back I checked my Yabbi pot and to my surprise I had caught a little fish! I let it go on the edge of the water and it wriggled back into the depths of the brown water.
When dinner time came around I dug I hole about 30cm deep to put the fire in, the gum tree branches make hot embers, perfect for cooking the sausages Trevor has given us! I got the flour and butter and made a pastry that I rolled out using my VSSL tube. I rolled the sausages in the pastry and made sausage rolls over the fire.
Dad and I drank herbal tea and ate a few cookies before crawling into the tent for a good night of rest. As I was shutting the zipper on the tent disaster struck! The zip came of its tracks, worried about the ants eating me alive I got my duct tape out and sorted it out. With the light from my goal zero solar crush lamp I realized that my feet were absolutely covered in dry mud, I thought about doing something about it but decided it was just mud and it wasn’t going to hurt me so I put them into the sleeping bag and drifted off to sleep.