My Adventure Story
We left Renmark a little late on day ten and headed off on the next stage of the adventure. About 40km out of town we turned onto some rough sand track and not long down this track the XR suddenly lost power. It was running fine at idle but refused to rev cleanly.
We had a quick conference and decided that it must have some contamination in the carburettor. Jay pulled the drain plug off the bottom of the carb and found the real problem when the main jet fell out with the drain plug! All the vibrations had caused the jet to come loose and eventually fall out.
We got that fixed and carried on through some awesome open sand trails. We stopped in Yunta for food and fuel then continued onto some open dirt roads. Every now and then there were ruins of old buildings, which made us wonder what people were doing out in this area.
We eventually started to see some hills on the horizon and these closed up into some interesting ranges, with the track winding through and over them. We finally arrived at Cradock in the middle of the afternoon and rewarded ourselves with a quick beer at the pub before heading on towards Blinman.
Late in the afternoon the track took us through some spectacular parts of the Flinders Ranges. I had an interesting close call when a kangaroo and an emu came out of the bush together and ran across the road. It wasn't particularly close but it was funny that the Coat of Arms decided to gang up on me...
Day eleven started early as we had big plans for making mileage. We started the day with a great run from Blinman through the Parachilna Gorge before a fuel stop at Parachilna pub.
We then headed off on open dirt roads towards our overnight stop. The Cooper Creek crossing is flooded, which meant we had to divert to the ferry crossing. Unfortunately, the wind had really come up and the ferry was shut down so we prepared to camp for the night.
After a couple of hours the ferry pilot came down and told us that they would run the ferry for an hour or so late in the afternoon when the wind dropped so we quickly packed up our gear and headed down to the crossing. We headed over the creek and took off up the road, racing the setting sun. Unfortunately the headwinds and diversion left the XR short of fuel and I ran out about 20km short of Mungerannie so we drained a couple of litres from Jay's DRZ and got in after dark.
We met up with a few of the Woodenbong starters at Mungerannie. The Caldwells and Tim and Dave also arrived there that night so we caught up with a few stories over a couple of beers.
We still hadn't been able to catch up ground so were looking to make an early start the next day. The story continues...
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