On the Bottom Half

The Tropic of Capricorn and other Oddities

I'm afraid this is only going to be a short post, but on with the show...

Such a resourceful team always gets interesting equipment donated. For example, I'm currently standing on the bed of our ute, with a computer set up on top of one of our stock crates, using the satellite Internet transceiver that was donated for our use. Venus is high on the western horizon, the Southern Cross and The Pointers are shining brightly right in front of me and I'm being irradiated with my own blog post thanks to the transmitter that is currently happily beaming this message through the messed-up workings of my brain for your reading pleasure. Thence the run-on sentence...

We successfully scrutineered and qualified, with some minor hicoughs at the Hidden Valley Raceway in Darwin; we got 11th position for the start. I was put in for the start, which is always a thrill. I think everyone knows what I think about being the finishing driver... The first two days were fraught with electrical problems, but this time of a different nature. We were overheating the motor controller, or some crucial electrical connections were rattling apart, or some finicky thing of that nature. That stalled us up for about an hour all told over those first days, but now at the end of the fourth day, we are first in our class! The team is pretty elated and it's gratifying to be ahead for once. Yesterday and today were essentially flawless, except today's flat tyre, which cost us the lead for about 2 hours.

One thing I forgot to mention about the Outback were the termite mounds. There's heaps and heaps of the things as you go north. Don't kick them or drive into them though, because your foot or your car would be less for the experience. Several nights now we've stayed under the wonderful southern hemispheric stars - that is once experience that I expect everyone reading this blog to one day do. These stars are breathtaking. The Milky Way is so bright it glows.

The flies are simply unbelievable - I've never experience such numbers. I will say this though: they are better than mosquitoes, if just as annoying. Passing lots of dead 'roos on the roadside, but one of the teams in the race (Nuon) has a roadkill crew, whose job it is to clean the road of any victims so that their car, which won the race today, doesn't impact anything untoward. So there you have it, the first two or three cars are already across the finish line and we have two more days to go. Yeah gallium arsenide...

I've met tons of people from around the World, but mostly from Taiwan, Australia, Japan, Holland, and Belgium. Definitely and interesting experience.

We drove south of the Tropic of Capricorn today, and I'm in the parking lot of the Cadney Homestead Roadhouse, for those of you with an atlas...

I've got to off and I'll post something more coherent when the race is finished and I've slept a little more. Thanks for all the comments - I enjoy hearing from everyone.

actrs - I've finally figured it out. The "Family Rock" gave it away. I guess I lied when I said we were going by Uluru - that is only for the GreenFleet Class.

Update complete!

posted by Kyle @ 05:12