Day 271 | 55km from Meekatharra: ie, nowhere much
102 km | Heading west total: 12,699 km
I’ve got into a particular routine with the biking.
I ride until about 5 30 when I start looking for an OK camping site. I like to get 200 m off the road out of sight of the occasional car or truck. I like to find a flattish spot with a smooth surface (sounds obvious but sometimes it’s not so easy to procure). That gives enough time, about an hour, to set up the tent and cook up a feed before the sun goes down. It gets pitch dark reasonably quickly but as I move away from the tropics is much more gradual than the 15 minutes of twilight in Darwin.
That means I’m horizontal about 7 or 7 30 pm.
At the other end of the day, the beginning, I generally get up just after the 5 am news on the radio and scoff brekky. I like to have the time concentrating on eating (and having a cup of coffee) before decamping. Somehow I have this belief that eating is one of the few rituals in my life and I should take it seriously.
When it’s hot I find I do take a decent break in the middle of the day but its best to have done about 60% of the riding by the time I stop. With the longer days it’s getting up to about 6.5 hours of riding a day.
That’s enough to make me feel as if I’m making some progress.