I tried flying the drone at Lake Baladjie. Link to some brief video footage below.
A broken night as I needed to get up and do the “Old Man’s Walk of Shame” (damned bladder). Breakfast was always going to be early if I intended to beat the flies. The embers in the fire pit were still warm and it didn’t take much to get it sufficiently hot for my Jaffle Iron. The bacon and egg jaffles were burnt but filling.
After packing everything away, checking the campsite and shovelling earth over the remains of the camp fire, I headed towards my next destination, Lake Ballard.
The lake was approximately 450km away and my planned route would take me through country with few public roads. Indeed, the previous evening one of the other campers who was a local informed me there was no road! Undaunted, I trusted my Open Street Map and Samsung Tablet GPS.
The first stop was at the town of Bullfinch (second arrow above). In 1910 gold was found here and the town rapidly developed. By 1963 the gold was exhausted and the last goldmine closed. Today little remains of the original town.
No swim today
See all the houses
I hadn’t been driving more than 15 minutes when the Samsung tablet GPS decided to have a coronary. After fluttering for a minute it went into a boot loop. Nothing I did would make it work. Now I’m in a quandary. The map in the Isuzu sat nav might be out of date for city driving and does show main roads. However they don’t have the detail I would need. Time to stop and think!
Whilst the road was corrugated it looked well used. I decided to press on using my watch as a compass to give me a general direction. One hundred kilometres later it became apparent the few roads I was crossing were private leading to mines. The eastern wheat belt was now well behind me and I was into the western goldfields. It’s actually quite surprising the number of mines out this way. Few appear to be gold; mostly nickel, cobalt, magnesium and rare earths.
A mine ‘Blasting Board’
My watch told me I was roughly heading in the right direction so I pressed on. The road corrugations started to get worse.
When I’m not driving on a sealed road I always engage 4WD high range to maintain better adhesion with the surface. If I'm towing I don’t exceed 70km/h.
The corrugations got even worse.
It’s wildflower season out here in the desert and took photos of some when I stopped to let the tyres and shock absorbers cool.
Not long after restarting the journey I noticed a thin tree branch lying across the road. I was doing 70km/h with no opportunity to avoid driving over it. Then the end of the branch rose into the air and looked in my direction. Oops! Snakes are protected in Australia and must be relocated rather than killed. I relocated this snake to heaven!
You will not be surprised to read I eventually reached Lake Ballard. Oh, and I never saw another vehicle during the 450km journey
2 comments :
That’s a lonely old road/track!
Ade it's certainly lonely but at least it's in reasonable condition.
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