The most expensive 5 litres of fuel in the world

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Starting speedo reading 70848

If you go to Melbourne you have to do the Great Ocean Road, its just the rules I don’t write them I just try to adhere to them when I can be bothered. This time I did, its about 200-300 KM stretch of road hugging the ocean between Torquay and Warnambool. I love that, it’s very Australian, if you go on a train journey the station names are fantastic one minute your stopping at Croydon or Lewisham next minute your in Wooloomooloo or Wagga Wagga. I’m more comfortble on the bike, while I wasn’t crazy on the Great Ocean Road , or GOR as I‘ll call it from now on as I can’t be bothered to keep writing the whole thing, I certainly wasn’t as sheepish into the corners, of which there are many and which are very sharp. It was lots of fun. The main reason you come here though is too see the beautiful rock formations coming out of the sea with names like ‘The Arch’, ‘Twelve Apostles’ and ‘London Bridge’, which in a classic case of irony has actually fallen down. They are nice but most of it is at the end of the ride, with my excellent pre-planning this meant by the end it was getting a little late so mostly I’d stop for ten minutes look at them, think how pretty they were grab a picture and move on. To be honest when you’re by yourself what else can you do, you not going to hang around for ages once you’ve seen the things its time to move on. It’s here that I start to wish I had someone to share some of this stuff with, sometimes you need someone to travel with and bounce off, I don’t think you always appreciate things if you don’t have someone to share the experience with. On the plus side though it means you can get through these things pretty quickly if you need to.

So first days travel Imanaged 415KM, not bad considering I was stopping to see lots on the way.

Second days travel I planned a little, I wanted to go to Mount Gambier just over the South Australia border to see the Blue lake then travel over to Robe. I’d had to make some hard decisions...Do I go to a town called Keith or do I go visit an oversized plastic lobster. Sorry Keith I went with the lobster. I planned to stop in Meningie to sleep meaning I’d travel About another 400 KM.
The blue lake is amazing, apparently it gets much bluer earlier in the year, as to why I couldn’t find out, but it still looked pretty astounding, there are some pictures of it wherever the pictures end up in the blog, above? Below? So I took the coast road up to Kingston and the huge crustacean. Again see picture. Yep its a big lobster, not sure I see the point but hell why not. I wonder if I missed anything more exciting in Keith? So I headed up for Meningie which was about another 150KM, I now, only now can I start to see what I’m in for, there are stretches on this road that seem to go on forever with nothing around just some sand dunes to my left and green green grass to my right, it gets hard to concentrate when you see nothing different for miles and miles, sometimes the road stretches out in front of me as far as the eye can see with no corners and no change in surroundings. Anyway as I get closer to Meningie I realise how much of the day is left and make a stupid decision. I can make it to Adelaide today if I push it, it’s another 200KM but I can do it. Sometimes you should stick to your plans. An hour and a half later its dark I still have a good distance to go and when I look down I see the bike is almost out of petrol. To be honest the fuel gauge on the TDM is shit you fill it up it stays on over full for ages then quickly drops down to empty where it stays for ages so basically you have no idea how much fuel you have, all I know is that on empty I ain’t going to make it too Adelaide its too far. So I pull off at the next turnoff and end up in the arse end of nowhere at some yokels pub where I am informed that the nearest open petrol station is 25KM away, fingers crossed. As I twist and turn through dark roads in god knows where I pray for the fuel to last, this really is nowhere. Finally I get to a village called Nairne but the petrol station is still 5KM away, as I clminb the hill out of Nairne the bike splutters to a stop. Thank God I was in a village otherwise it would have been a long walk in the dark. So I had to catch a taxi to the next town to the petrol station to fill my Jerry can and this is how 5 litres of fuel cost me 32 bucks, about 20 quid.
Oh well at least I found out that a full tank in good riding conditions takes me 400KMs and I get a good story to tell all you nice people. By the way had I stayed on the freeway I think I’d have made it into Adelaide on the fuel I had, especially as the last 10KM’s in are down a huge hill even if i had run out I could have freewheeled down. That day I did 735KM’s which I have decided is a stupid distance to travel in one day, unfortunaley I’ll have to do a couple of these days in the future but at least I know now what they are like, you’d think it’d be your arse that hurt the most but in fact its your knees. For the next few days I’m in Adelaide I’ll get back to you all on the way out.

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