Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Day 15 CSR it's baaack....

Day 15 CSR A temperature of 4 degrees greeted us at 6am.....brrrrrrr! The camels did not Harass us, after their little show last night. The gurgling and grunting only lasted a few minutes, but it did put us on edge for a while. Made a little fire to boil the kettle for smoko, tea and washing up. Our porridge went instantly cold, as always.  It is such a beautiful place well 30,the blood wood trees are so majestic after the stunted growth of the plains. The bird life is incredible as well, the birdsong that woke us was beautiful. It was out turn to hold up the show for while today, the roof racks have been working forward, so I adjusted them and we moved the shovel over to the drivers side, to see if that makes a difference.  Almost immediately after leaving the well, the blood woods end and we are back in the low scrub. We emerged onto a flat plain, with only spinifex and termite nests for a view, soon after that, we were back in the dunes, and happy for it. Those laterite ridges on the track make for very slow going, trying to look after the tyres.  The next big feature is King hill, which we did not visit, and Thring rock, which we did. Both features are named after members of the Burke and Wills expedition. We walked to the top and admired the view. We could see the sand hills to come as we travel south, and Lake Auld or Lake George, out to the west. The map doesn't make it clear which one it is, and to our east the breakaways which Thring rock is a part. The rock is very unstable, but a beautiful deep red. It was amazing how much windier it was only 100 feet above the clay pan on top of the rock. Not much plant life up there, a few hardy salt bushes is about it. Back into the sand dunes, a pleasant experience after the rocks and ridges of yesterday. We pulled into well 28 about 2.40pm, and decided to have an early day. Well 28 is a lovely place, although there is no water the collapsed well is surrounded by tea-trees, and sits between to sand ridges that run east to west. Lucky we did, as just after we pulled up, the inverter let us know it wasn't happy by making that horrible squealing noise that indicates it doesn't have enough power. Sure enough, the fridge was running and the temp inside was slowly rising. Our electrical gremlin was back.... I pulled out all the tool boxes and without any real idea of what I was doing, started pulling things apart. Eventually, we discovered that it wasn't the circuit breaker we suspected last time, as even a direct connection wouldn't work. I then undid the power cable on the solenoid and received an electrical tingle through my arm, indicating the solenoid isn't earthing properly. I undid all the cables and did them up again, the outback equivalent of rebooting, and away it went!! Not sure what has actually been fixed, but it has been fixed and that's the most important thing. We will see how long it lasts this time. Jon dug and enormous fire pit so to christen it, we dug out our dinky camp oven and made a chocolate damper. We have certainly lost our camp oven cooking touch these last few years, as it was burnt to a crisp... We decided that a flash restaurant would say it was chocolate damper on a charcoal base, so we went with that. The UHT cream we pulled out to go with it has been whipped by the corrugations! Also did some start trail experiments with the camera, have had mixed results to be honest....






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