Lovely clear night, not too cold, for some. Heavy dew kept the mud on the trailer sticky. Last nights campfire sprung into life again with a prod and a few sticks, amazing how much heat the old dry jam wood creates.
Breakfast of porridge or Weetbix, coffee then the pack up begins. It was slowed by my discovery that one of the engine drive belts had twisted and needed repair. An odd thing to happen indeed. The belt was newish, only a few months old, and I’d checked them all for tightness before leaving home. No harm done, but something else to ponder the hours away.
Kerry hurt her back packing up so we had a little walk to try to loosen her up. We found the track we had camped beside led further off into the bush with a wide graded pathway to somewhere. Found nothing interesting, or another pile of wood and ring of stones. We’d chosen a good spot.
Back on the main road by 9:45 we headed north towards Cobra station. At times the road was slippery and I took it as easy as I could to avoid chopping up the road and making it difficult for those following. We’d been given the latest road conditions report by the Shire office at Murchison, which said the Dairy Creek station to Cobra road was open to 4WD. So on we plodded. Dip after dip, floodway after floodway. Some with water, some dry, but low speed and caution were needed at every one. The choice to camp by the road really paid off.
A few hills appeared in the distance to break the standard flat landscape of the interior. The turn off to Gifford Springs station came. That’s the road towards the coast and was an option for us to head towards Emu Creek station as an alternate route. There were was no road closed signs, which was a good omen. No matter what, we had decided to rest up at Cobra, let the roads dry that little more. Soon after the turn off, we came across a long stretch, perhaps 40 metres of heavy mud that looked very cut up with deep wheel ruts. Caution, steady power and a great VeggiCruza got us through, with the trailer pulling us offline towards the ditch at one stage.
The greeting at Cobra was rather terse, as the Bangemall Inn owner had closed the road yesterday, unbeknown to us. He showed us a tourists vehicle that had rolled at that same spot when the tyres got caught in dried ruts. The seriously injured driver was lucky to survive. After we explained where we had come from, what advise we had been given, he has warmed and become regularly chatty.
So here we are at Cobra Station. Roads are closed all around, no way out. We have toilets, hot water, showers and food. We also have selection of mud from each of the stations we have passed through, packing up around 150mm deep on the trailer.
We joined Jim, Pedro and Rob around their fire for a good old country chit chat. They read books here. There’s Slow speed Satellite Internet, no radio, no TV, no mobile. Someone heard we have a new prime minister via telephone call. I asked Jim if that meant a whole lot to him. He’s lived on Cobra for forty years, I’ll leave you to imagine his reply.