Monday 27 June 2022
Today was not as cold as we were expecting. A low of 4.5° overnight. Not too bad. It was a bit windy so made it feel a little colder. We headed off from Arltunga at about 9.15am with a long drive ahead of us, 860km of unknown dirt road to travel over the next couple of days. The countryside is amazing and the East Macdonnell Ranges are as beautiful as the west. David loves this type of driving, the challenge of getting to our destination as quickly as possible whilst driving safely and smoothly as we both enjoy the ever changing scenery. From smooth track to heavy duty rocks with the potential of damage to our tyres at any time. Lucky me just gets to enjoy the view and DB arrives at our destination exhausted from the concentration involved in driving along the mostly deserted Binns track. We have been dealt an added challenge, the weather man forecasts rain in a couple of days. Hopefully it doesn’t come early as we may get stuck for a few days. Fingers crossed. Most of the drive is on dirt roads so we don’t know how far we will get today. The scenery was spectacular. We left Arltunga with the East MacDonnell ranges in our sights and we drove for a long while enjoying their beauty. The vegetation and road terrain was changeable all day. We live in such an amazing country. As we got closer to the Plenty Highway we approached the Harts Range and had that in our sights for a long while. We drove through stations, aboriginal land, the ranges and plains. Once we finally turned on to the Plenty Highway we started to head east. Over a little bit of bitumen but mostly dirt we continued for hours. The dirt was good most of the way, not as tricky as the Binns Track from this morning where it took a couple of hours to travel 100km. Anyway, it was a most enjoyable drive and we eventually covered over 500km and are within 10km of the Queensland border tonight. We will make it into QLD tomorrow.