The CrossingToward Penong
Fog, Farms And Fresh Fruit
Bitter fog followed me through fifty kilometres of South Australian farm country. Geoff and Lyn appeared with fresh fruit, and Ceduna began to feel like a place we might actually reach.
Day 45 started cold, foggy, and a little bit stubborn.
There were yet more technical glitches with the GPS data, and the first 9 kilometres were lost from the Strava record.
The walking still happened. I had put those kilometres into the cold and fog before the day had really opened up, and by then I was already deep into another 50 km shift toward Penong.
The fog did lift. When it did, South Australia started showing a different face. The flat, exposed Nullarbor feeling was giving way to rural landscapes: farms, sheep, llamas, scrub, fields, and hills. Lots of hills. Hills, hills, and more hills, according to me at the time.
The changes in the landscape were welcome. The variety was good. My legs did not always appreciate the hills, but after so long measuring progress by roadhouses, rest areas, cliffs, signs, and endless highway, seeing farms and animals gave the day a different texture. It felt like the country was changing again.
Ceduna was starting to feel close too. Not close in normal-person terms, obviously. There was still around 100 kilometres to go. But in the context of the Norseman-to-Ceduna stretch, “around 100 kilometres” had become the sort of number that could sound encouraging. All being well, we would reach Ceduna on Wednesday, restock on Thursday, and then turn properly toward Adelaide.
The finish-line feeling for the Nullarbor crossing was growing palpable. My legs, feet, body, mind, and every other part of me were tired, hurting, and mostly operating on autopilot. The daily rhythm was working, but with almost 2,000 kilometres clocked up and the Nullarbor nearly behind us, I am sure things were feeling tough for Ben and Ols as well.
They were not walking 50 kilometres a day, but support crew life was its own strange endurance event: waiting, driving, cooking, checking messages, managing the van, keeping track of where I was, and finding ways to occupy their minds for hours at a time.
One thing Ben and Ols were following closely was Dave Alley. He was out there smashing out a record-breaking lap of Australia, with days of 80 kilometres and more, no rest days, and the kind of effort that made my own ridiculous idea seem almost sensible by comparison. I joked that Ben and Ols were paying more attention to Dave Alley than to me. There was no realistic chance of him catching us where we were, but we were cheering him on from afar.
Then, after lunch, Geoff and Lyn appeared.
They gave us fresh fruit, made a donation, signed a heart, and stopped for a chat. I loved hearing their stories about travelling to Fremantle, the way the Nullarbor used to be, and a place called Wensleydale in Victoria, which I said I would definitely have to look up on the map.
Fresh fruit sounds small until you’ve been living in a campervan and crossing the Eyre Highway in 50-kilometre pieces. Geoff and Lyn had arrived at exactly the right time.
By evening, the line out of Perth and the dots in the west were starting to look as if we had really gone somewhere. We finished the day 29 kilometres west of Penong, with Ceduna close enough to believe in and one more big day waiting in the morning.
Images From The Day
