Tag Archives: roadtrip

Day Twenty-Nine – Alice Springs – Recharging

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I let Ed and Angie go to work and woke up around 2pm after recharging myself from the roadtrip the day before.  We didn’t do too much because we were all so exhausted so I just tried to suck up to their dog, Bailey, to get her to like me.

I then made us some garlic herb bread and a Massaman curry for dinner while Ed took a nap.  I felt the need to go for a swim, wake myself up and clean myself off so we headed down to the Casino for a dip in their pool at night time which was really nice to sit in the pool while looking up at the stars.

The day ended in another early night as the guys had been at work all day and hadn’t rested as much as myself.

Day Twenty-Eight – Adelaide to Alice Springs – Breakdowns and Ghost Towns

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The route from Melbourne to Alice Springs

The route from Melbourne to Alice Springs

We had been driving through the night and by sunrise we had arrived in Adelaide.  We stopped for fuel and kept driving.  The car seemed to be going quite well until we got out of Adelaide and problems started.  The car kept shuddering when it accelerated at high speeds. We were approaching the heat of the day and the car was struggling with overheating.  We hadn’t had a problem with overheating before now as the Bellarine Peninsular was pretty cold and driving through the night we couldn’t keep warm it was so cold.

We stopped a number of times along the way trying multiple strategies to cool the car down. We changed the coolant, we wired the fan to be on all the time, we wired the A/C fan to cool it down but nothing worked and the car continued to shudder and overheat.  We had to continuously turn the car off and on again to bring it back to speed.  We were all starting to get really tired having been swapping driving shifts and only sleeping in the back of the car and the problems were started to wear us out.

While trying to fix the car under a tree at one of the very few roadhouses a guy came over and tried to help us out but not much else came of it.  We got back on the road driving and had to stop again to try and fix it again.  One of the cars that stopped to see if we were okay happened to be this guy who lived in Coober Pedy which was about 150km down the road.  He and his friend offered to drive us in convoy in case anything should happen to the car then they could tow us.  It was really nice of them and good to know that if we were to break down then someone would be there.  But we made it to Coober Pedy and said our ‘Thank Yous’ and ‘Goodbyes’.

We were so tired by now that to cheer ourselves up we bought some hot food at the only place in town which seemed open and started again on the 7 hour drive from there up to Alice Springs.  By this time the sun was going down and the heat of the day faded away and the car seemed to be going well so I cracked on trying to get as close to Alice as we could.  We stopped at the South Australia/Northern Territory border for a quick photo and driver change and pushed on through finally making it to Alice Springs at 3.30am, 29 hours after leaving Melbourne.  We all crawled into bed exhausted.

Day Twenty-Seven – Ocean Grove to Adelaide – Crazy Ideas and Goodbyes

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After the major sunburning of 2014 yesterday, most of the day was spent inside trying not to make the burns worse.  We had to leave the house the next day so we started packing up and eating up all the left over food.  It started getting quite sad cause this would the last time I would see any of my family for a long time. Matthew and Emily would be heading back to Townsville, my Mum and Dad would be doing their tour of Australia before heading back to TCI and Ed and Angie would be driving back to Alice Springs while I would spend New Year’s Eve alone in Melbourne at a hostel.

I made a comment that if i knew Ed and Angie were driving back I would have gone with them and it made me think, “why don’t I?’.  So I looked up the cost of changing my flights and buying one from Alice Springs down to Melbourne and though a little pricey I kind of thought, why not? Why should we save our money in the bank and if you work hard for it then you should spend it on something you want to do.  So around 11pm I packed my stuff into their car, said goodbye to my parents and Matthew and Emily and we set off on the 22 hour drive from Melbourne to Alice Springs.