I grunt out of bed at 5:30am in the dark. Not having a moon makes this a tricky game, I have to find some of my stuff which remained scattered around last night. Not riding in makes it a bit harder to get organised, since gear is still in the van or somewhere and I really don't want to be missing anything important later in the day. Still managed to leave before 6am.
I like riding in the dark. I have two red LED lights on the back as well as a white strobe. One red on flash, one constant. Not that it matters, there's enough reflective tape to drown out the lights once people's headlights hit the trike. And road trains pass on the other side of the road starting about 3km back at a guess. From the van the other day I could see the trike quite well even with Alans crappy headlights, long before we were in any chance of seeing the bikes.
This will be somewhere between 170 and 190km today, by the map. But 9km into the ride I reach a turnoff that tells me it's only another 156km to Newman. So the group have two 80km days. Slack. And that 9km was a pretty constant downhill, as apparently is the rest of the ride. Something about leaving the highest point for 1000's of kilometres influences that fact, methinks.
My speedo is a bit off now that I've got the slow leak fixed (by changing the tube). At lunch it reads 92km but the 70km to Newman marker was at 89km. So I should get to Newman at about 155km on my speedo. This could make things interesting when it comes to distance covered for the trip.
The morning is pretty uneventful, I stop at about 8am to get out of my polypro and into shorts and shirt again. The mornings up here are a little brisk, especially when you're riding downhill. Due to not looking at the map I thought I'd be passing Auski Roadhouse, but it was left at the turnoff and I went right. So I didn't bring lunch with me, or much water. Meaning about 3 750ml bottles. Down to 1 left by lunchtime, but I'm in pretty wet country now, there have been a fair few bits of open water visible. Plan to arrive in Newman hungry and thirsty rather than spend time chasing safe water, since I can.
I stop at about 100km at about 11am, more through boredom and the vague hope that Evan might catch me than any great distaste for riding. My first ride after three days in the group with no exercise feels good. I doubt that Evan will actually show up, he lacks the organisation to beat off Naima and leave early, and he was feeling a little tired. You never know though, so I resolve to wait. I sleep in the shade for a few hours, reading and watching the traffic. I have chickpea goop from last night for lunch two, which is pretty wet as well as being food. It's entertaining thinking I'm short on water, even though I know I'm not really short.
There's no external reason to ride to Newman in a day, but I feel like it. And it's been a while since I've done a long day on a bike. Long now means hours rather than kilometres, this is a lot slower than I'm used to travelling. From memory my longest day in the saddle in NZ is about 12 hours, but the greatest distance on my MTB is quite silly because at one stage I was riding downwind all the time. It's an amusing way to travel, but you have to be pretty confident of your camping skills to get away with it for any length of time. And it gives you some amazing average speeds and daily distances :-) Hence my wish to ride Karratha to Nanutarra when we had that tailwind. 300km in a day would rock.
Speedo for the day: 166km, 20.7kph, 7:59 time travelling. The distance from the 20km marker to the 10km marker seemed to be a lot further than 10km. Arrived at about 7pm, feeling quite hungry. Moved the boom out about 30mm, then back a little. Rotated it too, trying to find a position that doesn't make my left knee hurt. May try inverting the boom and see what that does. But from now on I'll be in tandem mode, John has said he'll always ride if no-one else does because he wants to play on the tandem I think. Cool.
Camping in this happy town seems a bit hard. Some ugly householder chased me out of the first reserve I found, so I ended up a bit out of town towards the rifle range, just on the side of the road in some grass. And I have no idea where the people we're staying with are to be found, so I guess I just hang out tomorrow until people start arriving.