Day 2 - Wellington to Tintinara

No hills, but lots of wind, that just about sums up todays ride to Tintinara,

so we were up nice and early this morning, got the panniers packed, posted the previouse days blog and made a few tweeks to the bikes, mainly playing around with the postion of the rear panniers on the racks to see how it effected handeling, then off we headed in search of water and food for the start of the day.

Our first stop of the day came 500 meters in to the ride where we got to the Murray River on the edge of Wellington. after joining the queu we eventualy boarded the ferry and were away on our 200 meter ride across the river.

We were eventually off and riding once again, we had been tossing up between two possible routes for this second leg and in the end decided we would brave the highway, we knew it would be busy and that there were roadworks but it was the most direct route and didn't really feel like tackling more rough dirt roads just yet. Well the first 30km's or so went quire well after we started with the wind in our backs until Tailem Bend and the roadworks turned out to be a blessing in disguise, more often than not the speed limit was down to between 60 to 80 and in some cases even slower, we also found the dirt left of the shoulder was often smoother than the road, giving us a good 5 meters at times from the traffic.

We were more than happy to share the road with trucks and cars at this speed.

But after the first 30km's we began to face strong head winds and if it wasn't in our faces it was blowing us around from the side, add the heat (Jason's bike computer read over 40 degrees at one point.) to this and the rest of the day became pretty tough.

Oh and Garry had his second crash of the tour, this time pulling of an old favourite where he stopped and couldn't get his feet out of the pedals fast enough, sure enough there we was laying on the ground with the bike on top of him, a predicament that was made worse by the extra weight of the load on his bike, unfortunately Jason couldn't get the camera out fast enough for a shot.

One of the interesting traffic safety signs we saw along the way.

The long straight road to Tintinara.

South Australia is the driest state in Australia and we could see why, the roads are open and straight with little to no shelter from the wind and heat, all we could do was keep rolling along and keep the fluids up. 

We eventually made it to Coonalpyn where we simply had to get out of the heat for a while before continuing on, after a good 1/2 hour break we were back on the road and heading for Tintinara.

Garry having a little nap on the lawn at Coonalpyn.

Arriving into Tintinara, our stop for the night.

Garry and Jason would like to thank the local store in Coomandook for their hospitality and donation to our charities during our lunch stop today and also the local motel in Tintinara who generously donated a room to us for the night.

It's an early start tomorrow for our longest leg for the week, 125km's from Tintinara to Kaniva in Victoria.