Outback Road Trip with Kiki - written by Michael King (Kiki) from an outline by Michael King & Mike Regan (I, me)
23 November - 1 December 2014
Trip Diary Notes
Sunday 23 November:
Sydney to Cobar. Left Sydney around 12-30pm. Later than planned because Kiki had had bad sleep the night before and had left Canberra late. He arrived unshaven, looking tired & obviously still grieving over dropping his new IPhone 6plus the day before on a road, rendering the device largely inoperative. Through the miracles of GPS he managed to find his way to the penthouse & his inner big city palpitations subsided somewhat upon his arrival in Darlinghurst. Mei was keen to get me out of the house and on my way so she could embark on the day’s activities she had planned for the family. With my stuff along with his gear, Kiki’s car was loaded up to the gunnels - we had more gear and provisions than the Burke and Wills expedition! Because of Kiki’s inner city angst and tiredness, I drove out of Sydney in his new Mazda CX5. Initially we used two different sat navs to get out of Sydney - one from my own IPhone & the Tom Tom, which was a feature built into the CX5. We quickly realized there were some limitations to having two GPS in operation, potentially offering conflicting advice, deciding to follow Kiki’s GPS and the in car system guided us to the harbour tunnel. I was impressed by Kiki's new car. praise which Kiki took personally and accepted as cheap vicarious self validation. Early on we encountered a nob who horned us as we entered tunnel. This made me glad to be leaving aggro Sydney drivers behind us. Kiki’s sat nav threw a tantrum as we went to get on the M4 - it wanted to take us via the cape through Richmond, but we ignored her polite instructions to take in this NW Sydney metropolitan locale. This was the only time for the remainder of the road trip that she wanted to give us a bum steer. Who knows, the Bells line of road might have been shorter than going through the Blue Mountains via the Great Western Highway, but we decided to plot our course and stick to the familiarity of the route via Penrith rather that take what appeared to be a nonsensical suggestion from the technological savant. The thermometer hit 46 degrees C just north and west of Sydney - record temperatures for November. There were many speed limit changes going through the Blue Mountains, which concerned Kiki, but I as a road safety expert and Professor was totally all over the speed limit situation - in fact I knew more than Kiki’s sat nav which was strangely silent when we did go over the speed limit - I investigated this, but couldn’t get a warning beep out of her as she refused to play ball on warning us when we did exceed speed limit signs, both those hoisted on posts and those painted on roads. Fueling up, another nob horned us when we were too slow to move away from the bowser. Moving from the bower needs to be done deliberately, with care & after zeroing all fuel consumption, tripmeter and average speed readings, but we doubted the horning nob would appreciate our perspective on service station exiting procedures, so we eschewed explanations to our impatient fellow road user while counselling each other to remain calm. It was 40 degrees C in Katoomba, very unusual for the mountains. Speaking of heat, Kiki had a toasted sandwich at Mcdonalds in Lythgow that was very busy and hard to access. I had tinned tuna and bread, which reinforced my views that my eating habits were far healthier than Kiki's. It was difficult to prepare and eat my meal in my lunch box in the heat, but years of practice, eating airline food in cramped conditions on a range of domestic and international routes meant I was well prepared for the task of awkward eating. Went through Lithgow, home of Roy Slaven/John Doyle & while no longer in Sydney I realized we still had some way to go before we reached the bush, let alone the outback. Stopped at a rest area in Mudgee for a break & to change drivers. While there, I availed myself of the opportunity to take photos of grafitti in the toilet. This is something Kiki does and has introduced me to & while I’m not entirely comfortable with the notion of taking a camera into a public toilet, I realized it was important to ignore my qualms so as to comprehensively document all local culture during our road trip. Got petrol in Dubbo where the temperature still hovered in the low 40s.. Kiki filled up the washer fluid reservoir and the heat of the day and from the car's engine had softened and made very pliable the plastic reservoir measuring stick making it challenging to reinsert it into the reservoir - a minor design flaw in the CX5, which no doubt Japanese engineers will turn their mind to in future models and hopefully fix. Stopped in Narromine, birth place of famous Australian opening bowler, Glenn McGrath, who has a statue bearing his name near the centre of town. Kiki went over to the statue, looked at it, and quickly realised a photograph of him and McGrath was not worth a digital image, so turned away from the bronze representation of bowler who took over 500 wickets for his country, satisfied that a mental picture of what he had seen would suffice as a memory marker for any future recollection of the significance of ‘Pigeon’ McGrath in the Narromine sporting firmament. Kiki contemplated buying some dodgy gyros takeaway at a shop he had visited just over nine years previously during a storm chase. However, I gently but persuasively convinced him from a risk assessment point of view the food on offer may cause digestive and excretory issues in the short and medium term. This lead to a quick revamp of our dining plans so we proceeded on to Nyngan instead for our dinner. This town is near the geographic centre of NSW, which prompted Kiki to regale me with stories of how he had been to both the geographic centres of Australia and continental USA. While noting his experiences, I was neither overly impressed with these achievements nor prompted to offer any of my own as far as reaching mid points in continents, countries or states. Nevertheless, deep within me, and at the time subconsciously, I knew my wider travels had taken me to heart of more jurisdictions than my travelling companion could ever dream of. At the local RSL in Nyngan both of us had fish dinner, Kiki a grilled fillet, while mine was battered. We both sampled the salad bar, and our meals included chips, which we gleefully scoffed after a long day on the road. However, my gut wasn’t feeling so good as I drove from Nyngan to Cobar in the dark, for about 139 km, but I knew it could have been worse if we’d eaten the dodgy stuff in the Narromine take away. Arrived in Cobar at 11-00 pm, where it was still 38 degrees. Kiki told me the first time he’d been to Cobar they’d just had a downpour from a storm with cloud tops to 17 kilometres, so both our first forays to this town at the gateway to the outback had been had during times of meteorological extremes, albeit ones quite different in nature. As such it was too hot to even sleep outside, so it was fortunate we had booked an air conditioned room saving us from the prospect of a toasty alfresco night under the stars! I shifted my bed away from the air conditioner and the bed's initial placement and some minor drainage issues in the bathroom were the only flaws we could find in this 3 and a half star motel room. We turned in for the evening. TBC.
