Most of the group seem to have a horror of meetings. Apparently they go on for hours and nothing useful ever gets resolved. And people just get dragged down until they'll agree to anything just to get it over with.
But, regardless, we need to have a meeting and decide what to do next. Jonas, Anna, Evan and I have a pre-meeting to work out the itinerary options, and come up with a few different things to do. We want to leave on Saturday if possible, and get all positive about things. Jonas has also joined in Broome, Evan and Anna I know from the organisational stage in Sydney.
The meeting turns out to be less bad than expected, perhaps because there are only 12 of us here, so there is not the unwieldy mob of 30- odd that they had for much of the Gibb River Road. Still a bit of agreement by endurance, there are people who will talk until they get their own way, but it doesn't seem insurmountable. We decide to do lots of riding (we kind of have to...), incidental visits to communities and schools, and an action in each town we go through. (the meeting itself took about 5 hours)
The current plan is to go south along the coast to Geraldton then inland, pretty much as per the CANC2 web site (http://www.cycle.wild.net.au), but we're probably not going to do the eastern part of the loop as it's 12 days of dirt roads which would be better spent doing actions and education in towns that we pass through.
We had our final presence in town at the Saturday morning market, where we shared a stall with Environs Kimberley. Sunny managed to meet up with a woman (Annette) from Bidyadanga community which is about 150km south of Broome, and she invited us to drop in, have dinner, camp and meet people. Yippee! We ride out of Broome about sunset, so I get to do a bit of night riding too. Full moon so it's not hard, although getting used to the tandem could take a while. John is driving, I'm getting a chance to explore the back seat. My first instant camp with the group is a bit exciting, but I'll cope.
Making camp seems to consist mostly of everyone stopping somewhere and we just dump everything out of bikes/van and cook up, then sleep. The country is pretty open and the road not too busy, so it works quite well. I'm getting use to the idea of no tent but a mozzie net. That's odd. Plus being warm at night - I'm sleeping more or less under my sleeping bag rather than in it, and it's a contest between being cool or being eaten by mosquitoes. I'm sure I'll get used to the idea of sleeping out in low scrub, but the first night is definitely unsettling.