Woohoo, I'm famous ... well just a little!

Good morning Pete

Yes I am still amazed with the lack of knowledge about the vastness of the Australian outback. Had relies here from the UK last year - I mentioned that next time they come out I'd like to take them "outnack" - somewhere like Cameron Corner for instance. They were absolutely gob smacked when I told them that we would take 3 days just to get there and not even leave NSW to do so. Further to do that trip than from one end of the U.K. to the other.

Cheers and be safe out there

Hi Pete

Well done and I hope you got full credit for it.

Long time since you have been online here, hope things are going well for you.


Cheers



Stephen

Talking about the size of our "little" island home;

I used to talk to a bunch of American hams on a weekly schedule and one night that were happy to say that they, all four families, were coming to see Australia soon. All four families and coming to see the Great Barrier Reef and places like Birdsville and the Simpson. That was almost a their exact words. As much as they can in two weeks. !!!!!! I won't say what I thought.

I suggested that they get two maps, the same scale, one of Australia and another of mainland USA. Then put one over the other and see how much they could do in two weeks on the USA map and start planning the same area on the Australian map.

They were also surprised, as John's relatives were, that it takes three days just to drive the length of the reef and also to get to Birdsville from here. And then I mentioned that they will need all the communications and safety stuff as service stations can be hundreds of kilometers apart.

Not one of them had changed a flat tyre on a car. Why would I change tyre pressures. I am thinking "this will be fun for me if I go with them"!!!! Most of the blokes were in electronics and communications and wouldn't have had anything bigger then a small soldering iron or screwdriver in their hands. Hmmmm And they want to go to the Simpson.

I don't know if they came or not. I was away for a while with work and when I came home I didn't turn the radio on as I was sick of talking computers and programming. I just wanted to leave work at work.

I do hope that they got here. But I doubt it as that was all the time that the four families could arrange to have together. I didn't hear from them again but that was the nature of the hobby. They may have gone back to their regular sched on UHF and given HF a miss after I failed to turn up for the scheds. Packet radio was in it's infancy back then. It's now called emails and the internet. It wasn't as reliable as today., especially on HF.

Phil

Pete - Well done, and those pics are especially good. I would expect the Germans running the blog probably picked up Caroline Grossmuellers name from the stories on the internet about her tragic death - and your pics would probably have been found via searches on names in the area where she died.

Because her name was German, it would have been a magnet for the bloggers to find out more.
Anything that helps educate overseas visitors intending to travel to remote areas in the Outback, can only be good.

Cheers, Ron.

I love telling people that I live in a state almost as big as Europe and we have only two sealed roads across the border that are about 1800 km apart.

Not sure how to do Googletranslate but I got the gist of enough of it. The essential advice for the unsuspecting German traveller was there in the last few paragraphs re staying with the vehicle etc ("bleibe beim Wagen").
I hope they plug the dangers of the Krokodil in their blog one day, too.

Robyn :)