Rest days at Longreach

After a very long break at Longreach due to waiting for my back wheel which in the end didn't end up coming - unfortunately Stu from Tuckers Cycles in Rockhamptom ordered the wheel from their supplier but still hadn't paid for the wheel to his suppliers by Tuesday so we cancelled that order and Neil managed to find just a normal cheap rear wheel at a BP station that had bicycles and accessories so we bought that wheel and had decided to keep my wheel on until around Charters Towers and then maybe have to put the new wheel on. We didn't really want to put the new wheel on now as we still have nearly 1000kms to go cycling through the middle of nowhere and since it is only a cheap wheel the wheel may not last so at the moment it is our back up!
So on Monday when Neil kept going back to the Post Office and again on Tuesday morning and again it still wasn't there Neil was becoming very stressed and feral and when he found the cheap wheel ... he was happy again. I don't think he wanted to spend any longer in Longreach! But while we did have our enforced rest we did manage to do a few chores namely putting visors on our helmets ... Neils' is held on with velcro dots while mine is held on with a velcro strap on one side and elastic string on the other! We were both happy with the results!

We also managed to give Kouta haircut as the weather is really warm now! so now he looks like a giant rat!

On a cloudy day we cycled out to Thomsom river to have a look at the free campsite out there, the night before it had rained a bit so after looking at the campsites and deciding that it is not suitable for a tent as it is a giant dust bowl we rode across the river on a bridge that was clearly under the water when this area flooded earlier this year and not paying attention to anything really we soon realised that the sediment on the bridge was beginning to build up under the mudguards and covering the tyres and soon you couldn't pedal at all for all the mud that was stuck under the mudguard. Mine was the worse as my mudguards are alot closer to the tyres than what Neils are!

It took us ages to get the mud off in the end I had to lift my bike over the bridge as the wheels wouldn't spin anymore due to the clogging!
Around the river the area is very lush due to the flooding and like most rivers out here they are still flowing.

On Tuesday evening there was alot of people camping around us and believe it or not we had 3 European cyclists turn up - the couple was Danish and they were travelling with a Norwegian guy. The Danish couple started off in Brisbane December last year and were heading back there in another 2 weeks - they had cycled around Australia (130000km!) and I missed where the Norwegian guy had been and was going to. Anyway they had been fight headwinds since Darwin so they were very sick of it by the time they got to Longreach!