We're still in Karratha, waiting for the van to be fixed. Next time I vote we take a security blanket instead, it's less likely to break. Anyway, this gives us a chance to have more meetings and wait for the tailwind to drop. Woke up late, about 7am, and talked to Evan for a while. Stayed up half the night talking to John, good discussion though.
Todays plan is that I carry a pile of stuff to cook dinner with, and then ride with Bindi to the river where we were supposed to be a couple of days ago. We cook dinner for the group there, and they filter out to join us during the day. The cool thing is the trike with a giant saucepan on the back as well as all my stuff. A most excellent load-carrying device.
Went to library and used the net (eventually, it was down for a while). Luckily us geekheads know how to use Notepad to compose an email for sending later. Unluckily the librarian was mistaken about which computers could access the net when it was up, but fortunately Jonas had a floppy I could use. Rode round town for a bit, saw a bike with a Bob Yak on it disappearing into a motel but didn't chase the owner. Finally got round to emailing the Perth recumbent riders group guys to tell them I'm arriving.
The excitement at the river when I got there was first finding the camp (the river is a wide, marshy thing with lots of camp sites), then when I was organised I thought I'd try to take the front wheels off and replace some spokes now that I have the right length ones. The first lot are a few millimetres too long so I built them three cross, two twist (normal three cross wheels are under, under, over for one twist, mine are under, over, under for two twists). That soaks up enough length that the spokes don't poke into the tubes. But because of that they break more often than strictly necessary. Well, that and the tendency of other riders to brake as though the front hydraulic disks are V brakes, by grabbing the levers and hanging on for dear life. This shock loads the whole system, because the front wheels lock up suddenly when you do that. It's always the outside trailing spokes that break. Luckily, because I can replace them without pulling wheels off.
Not that removing wheels is tricky, one 15mm nut and they're off. But, and this is a big but, I didn't grease the axles before I put the wheels on. So they are seized onto the axles now, and won't come off with the gentle pulling I can do on the side of the road. But now I have the time and inclination to get serious about pulling them off.
An hour later, and lots of pulling, levering, swearing, bending tools and generally pissing about, and I decide the wheels are stuck in place. Maybe later when I can afford to risk damaging something I can try a bearing puller or something.
Dinner is a bit of a breeze, Bindi seems to be quite happy to have me helping and it all just comes together. And at a reasonable compromise hour as well, ready by about 6:30pm. This is fortunate, because the scheduled 6pm meeting is a bust. Anna, Naima, Chris, Jonas and Tali have arrived, but the van and everyone else is missing.
We have a pre-meeting and talk about itinerary planning mostly. Maybe having a weekly group thing to decide an outline plan that the daily people can work with. With the new route it's only about 1500km to go. To get to Perth on time we need to average a massive 55km a day, which means we can have an action day, a rest day, and an 80km riding average.