#2: [13-Dec-06]

15-Oct-2001 -- We had a big day doing this one, my father Fred had an escorting job moving a house from the recently closed Kidston gold mine and he had to bring it back to within 8km of the confluence so i decided to become a passenger and knock over an easy one.

It must be said though, that the 250km road from Charters Towers to the Lynd is a single lane track seemingly used only by road trains (our Australian semi-trailers that have 3 trailers and are 53 metres long ), we were held up near Greenvale for a little while to let a wide load from the mine go past; it was a huge dump truck. Later we found out that they were going to have a very long trip as they broke down.

From the Lynd to Kidston is a 74km dirt road made entirely of corrugations, which are bad to drive on normally but agony when you're following a house at 20km/h.

We had started at 04:30 that morning and finally at 18:00 we'd finished escorting the house and doing the paperwork, so it was into the Greenvale pub for a quick beer then off to the confluence less than 2km away before the sunlight went away.

We found a confluence sign outside the closed garage, but it was about 1930 metres from the spot according to my GPS. We didn't find the right track into the confluence so ended up walking 360 metres to get to it; luckily a dry creek bed made that fairly easy. Of course we found another road only about 20 metres from the spot, so readers are encouraged to take a visit and get some better photos than we were able to get in fading light.

It was 18:15 and time to get home, only 360km on a kangaroo infested night time road. These animals have no road sense at all, their brain seems to follow the logic of "jump towards the headlights" - luckily the kangaroos must have been on holidays this night as very few were seen and cattle were more of a problem.

Big day, 1000km and home finally at 23:30. I suppose the only excuse for doing this is the adventure but I must find a way of making the days shorter.