Jeremy is a musician and Bridget is an artist. Jeremy likes motorbikes, Bridget doesn't really care much for them. Jeremy and Bridget got married, Bridget said "Let's go to Alice Springs on a motorbike for our honeymoon." Jeremy said "ALRIGHT!"


Tuesday, November 15, 2011

The mighty murray

Well, we've landed on our feet tonight! After beating down the murray valley highway in the roasting afternoon sun, we've landed at wendy and peter's holiday cottage after they so kindly offered it to us for the night. My, what a beautiful place! We feel like the luckiest people on earth tonight, what with a bed and a shower and all. I think we're both really looking forward to meeting them tomorrow night! That's right, bridget met wendy over the internet and when wendy heard that we were on our way up here for our honeymoon she offered us their holiday cabin.  What an amazing privilege, and we are thoroughly enjoying ourselves.
We've just had a lovely dinner (we're finally able to really cook something special after weeks of camp kitchens) of a big roast veggie salad with fried haloumi cheese and flat bread which we ate on the veranda over-looking lake charm. With a bottle of wine of course.
It was roasting today, but the road from mildura to swan hill was gorgeous. Hundreds of acres of olive groves, orange orchards, vineyards and even a couple of rice fields were strewn all the way along the length of the road. It looks like from all the rain that there will be a great orange crop this year. The trees in the orchards looked like they  were straining under the weight of all the fruit. It seems like most of the orchards did some kind of roadside honesty box arrangement, and they were all full of bags and bags of fruit, for $2 a bag. This is one area where the motorbike couldn't quite cut it. No big heavy bags of oranges for us.
The other great news is the incredible mileage we're getting out of the bike now that we're not going into a head-wind at 110-120kmh. We got 227km today before I even needed the reserve tank (as opposed to 174 on the stuart highway between port augusta and alice springs). So if you're travelling at 100kmh and the wind isn't too high you could feasibly get 270-280 kilometers out of a tank. Clearly an extra gear, or a couple of extra teeth on the rear sproket would maybe be in order if you were going to use a shadow 750 for any serious touring that involved prolonged highway speeds. But as a general use bike it's fuel consumption is amazing!







2 comments:

mrsnesbitt said...

Wow! What a great stop over! We are thinking about travelling around the country visiting our online pals - fantastic stuff!
ENJOY!
Bet the wine went down well!
Onwards & Upwards!

sue f said...

lovely to read about your luxury night in Wendy's fab cabin. what a view! What a treat! I'm delighted for you.