After my sleepless night in White Cliffs, I really wasn’t in the mood to drive too far the following day. I was keeping an eye out for a free campsite at one of the nicer roadside stops along the highway eastward when I just happened to pop into a roadhouse for a coffee. Anyone advertising “Real Coffee” in the outback must actually know how to make it properly! I popped in and noticed they were offering cheap camping around back with nice shady places, hot showers, real coffee, and a staff of European backpackers. It couldn’t be all that bad!
I got a little restless in afternoon and decided to ask them whether there were any 4wd tracks in the area I could mountain bike for a little while. They looked at me like I was a bit nuts and it turned out I was. I noticed a national park nearby boarding the owners farm property and got permission to ride through to try and get into the park. Unfortunately, after only about 10-15 minutes of bike riding I found myself with both tires flat due to double-G’s Double-G’s are double thorns that will tear through any mountain bike tire. I very rarely get flats, but I had to spend the rest of the afternoon scrutinizing my tires to find all the tiny thorns and pick them out so they would not re-flat my new tubes. the experience made me very wary of riding off trails for a while!
