Day 1 - Sydney to Broome

Nic says “I just want to say thankyou to everyone for coming last night. It was great to have you all there to see me off on my farewell.


We managed to leave Newcastle at 7am this morning and have been travelling all day. We are currently writing this in the car 1hr outside Broken Hill. Its been a rad day and a super special thank you to Zoe shes don’t a great job on the van. Photos to follow.

The highlight of my day today was kicking zoe’s ass in the wildlife spotting competition (25 points to 0). I saw a camel, an emu, roo’s and more feral goats than I knew existed on earth.

I thought that the outback started on the western side of Broken Hill, that was clearly naïve. Outback NSW starts just after Warren where I came toi a T junction, took a right and have travelled 580kms on the straightest road I have ever seen in my life. I really love the colour of the dirt and as much as you may ask yourself what there is to see out here, the answer is… you’ll have to make the effort to find out because spectacular falls short of my impressions so far. No photo will do justice to the colours of the sunset I saw this evening. We’ve got a fairly easy day tomorrow where we hope to end up in the Flinders ranges for the evening. Very excited to hit the first bit of dirt in the Mitsubishi monster. I’m Nic Luitingh over and out.”



Z – Touching Nic as always… Maybe you should think about a career as an abc correspondent! =.)

Now for my side… I can tell you all about the more subtle hilarities of the day…

My day started (proper) after I had had my second coffee in Denman where I took over the driving. For the next couple of hours Nic proceeded to pull apart the dashboard piece by piece to install the speakers and amp so we had some music to listen to. We lost the use indicators for a while, and the hazards came on and off a couple of times but after 30mins or so of fiddling and cursing it was all put back together and the i-pods began to crank some good tunes.

Good thing too as Nic has kept himself entertained for a good 5 minutes this evening beeping the horn along to the rhythm of “I’m a believer”… You have to love being able to make as much noise as you want without it mattering. Plus it was a good way of keeping all these goats off the bloody road! You’d better watch out buhdt… Its minus 25points for hitting wildlife!!!

Pre-trip drinks

Our 6am start (pre coffee)

Aaaah! Coffee!!

A bit excited after leaving the farm

(thanks for the bed Craig & Sharon!)

Welcome to Warren

 

You have to love the lack of traffic

550kms of a straight road... On the last leg to Broken Hill.

150kms out of Broken Hill.