Day 20 – Balladonia to Norseman (192km)
This morning was the coldest morning we have had so far. We rolled out in our usual warmer morning riding gear but it took well over an hour for any of us to warm up, despite the morning ride having several steep undulations.
The first 80km had us riding North West with a slight cross wind (yet again). We had been under the impression that we would be turning into the head wind after this section but for some reason it stayed as a cross wind, turning to a slight tail wind at times.
In this section we had our first bad experience with a truckie. Unlike all the other truckies that have given us loads of space or waved/tooted when coming from the other direction, this one drove up as close as he could and blew his horn, nearly bursting all of our ear drums in the process.
The spirits of the group were clearly up as we knew we were very close to having conquered the Nullarbor. This was particularly evidenced by Dan’s upbeat singing and joking during morning tea.
We experienced similar conditions for the ride through to lunch although the temperature became much more pleasant than the early morning section. After numerous days of no elevation gain to speak of, we found that today we had climbed from our start point of about 150m elevation through a highest point of about 450m elevation.
Mark took this one over his shoulder while climbing a hill!
For lunch today we all ‘enjoyed’ salmon sandwiches (as the only fresh filling available) for the third day running, although this time the cheese rations were even further reduced. We will all be happy once we have restocked our supplies in Norseman!
After lunch we had just under 70km left to ride to complete the continuous 7 day stretch of over 1,200km from Ceduna to Norseman. This last section seemed to go pretty quick, we stopped to fill our water bottles with about 30km to go and made it through to Norseman.
Just before reaching Norseman Alyce spotted a very big log on the side of the road and thought she would have to get a photo to add to her ‘log book’ (which she thought was hilarious).
One for the log book...
We are all thrilled to have conquered the Nullarbor! There have been some very testing conditions along the way but we all managed to pull through it and get it done. We will write more about it in our rest day reflections.
