Up at 7 am, pack up the tent in a spurt of optimism and then ride in to Hyden to check the post.

The spoke tools have arrived!!!! Thankyou Robyn and Australia Post!

About two hours to replace the spoke and bodge up a rough true to reduce the wobble. Reassemble all the various tools, set tyre pressures at 75 psi down from the 85 psi which seems to lead to broken spokes.

align=”alignnone” width=”300″] The back wheel gets its 36th spoke back and a partial fix to the warped rim.[/caption]

And then have lunch.

Finally headed out on the road at about 13:00 with a slight tailwind. Glorious.

The extra energy in the legs from the enforced layoff, the tailwind and the flattening landscapes made the miles fly by. After an hour or so I even stopped looking back down at the wobbling wheel and trusted my repairs to get me to the end, actually to Kalgoorlie.

At about 40 km the vermin proof fence appeared marking the end of civilization. A couple of km further on even the bitumen stopped and the dirt began.

The 260 km of dirt on the Hyden-Norseman road is generally fabulous. Another few million of $$$ from Royalties for Regions that has been well spent.

A few km of the Hyden-Norseman road are rubbish. A km or more of loose dust a few centimetres deep that the cars and trucks wouldn’t notice are enough to send your cyclist chasing side to side over the road looking for the most solid base. When a solid base couldn’t be found it was time to dismount and walk for a few hundred metres until the surface improved again. If the dismount wasn’t quick enough the dust would catch the front wheel and bring progress to a rapid, wobbling stop. If not caught in time, a horizontal dismount could, and on one occasion did, occur. As always, horizontal dismounts always happen in front of tourists who are already skeptical that bicycles should not be allowed out beyond the local park.

Pushing onwards I finally called it quits when the western sky turned pink and the shadows covered the road.

At Forrestania I saw a nice track heading north towards North Iron Top and a patch of gum trees rising over the heathland. Hoping for water or a nice sandy patch to camp on I headed down hill. Halfway I saw old (couple of weeks probably) cycle tracks left by another intrepid rider no doubt doing the same thing.

Half a km in, and 5 km short of the Forrestania Mine camp was set up in a lovely sandy area next to a thicket of denser than usual scrub that elsewhere would mark the presence of surface water. Here, who knows.

To bed.