Stop! Wrong Way. Go Back.

We're stuck in Port Augusta until the night of Saturday waiting for the tow truck to arrive from Adelaide. I try to make the best of a bad situation but this town refuses to make things easy. I scour the tourist brochures for ideas and the best I can come up with is a steam train departing at 10:30am. Unfortunately a combination of not getting back with the hire car until after 10:00am, both of us forgetting to bring our cameras, and neither of us remembering the whereabouts of the train station, means we arrive minutes too late. Disappointing.

Dave is in a foul mood over the bike so I do my best to steer clear of him. He wanders off to stare daggers at his bike while I make good use of a wifi access point. This isn't my idea of a holiday but it's only a delay of one day.

Or so I had thought. Unbeknownst to me, Dave has arranged to pick the bike up personally in Adelaide the morning of Tuesday, three days from now. I had assumed we would just continue the trip west because BMW is obligated to ship the fixed bike to wherever we are in our travels. That would be somewhere in Western Australia. However Dave wants to discuss the problem face to face with the mechanics. He even mentions he might need a few hours with them!

I'm completely surprised by the decision he's made. The delay of three days plus the 700km round trip between Port Augusta and Adelaide will leave us significantly behind schedule to reach Perth on June 30. This probably means missing out on parts of southern Western Australia.

There's not much I can do about it now though. I have an unspoken obligation to Kirsten to ride with Dave and I can't leave him in the lurch, even if he is heading in the wrong direction. Anyway it's only a few days out of the trip.