The race crew has returned to Adelaide after a long mock race and what an amazing experience it was. 2,009 kilometers of testing over 5 days on the Stuart Highway. It’s safe to say that we learned more in the past 5 days of testing than we have during any other time with Continuum. With 666 kilometers remaining on our planned mock race course, it’s ironic that our testing was cut short due to our encounter with what’s conventionally called a dust devil.

Though damage to Continuum was minor, our engineers did not want to risk making delicate repairs with such limited resources in the outback. Once repairs are completed later today, we’ll begin cleaning and tuning Continuum before additional testing early next week.
Since words can’t capture experiences in the outback, here are a few images from our testing last week:
(Above) The Stuart Highway is a very long, very flat, very straight road. Our mock race looked mostly like this for hundreds of kilometers at a time.

(Above) The road surface is VERY rough and unforgiving. We learned this the hard way in 2005.
(Above) These are two of the 6 vehicles we drove during mock race. The Holden Adventura LX8 on the left is our weather vehicle with the weather fixture lovingly called the “Thunder Box.” The Holden Rodeo on the right is our scout vehicle.

(Above) This Holden Captiva is our chase vehicle, bearing the all important “Caution: Solar Vehicle Ahead” sign required of all teams. This is the center of our support crew operation and is filled to the brim with computers, radios, and Wolverines.

(Above) The race passes through a series of 30-minute control stops along the race route. This is a picture of the race crew charging Continuum at the Glendambo control stop.

(Above) Continuum ready to hit the road at Port Augusta control stop.

(Above) Continuum being taped up at the Cadney Homestead control stop

(Above) We deploy our semi trailer evening morning and evening to help give everyone the resources they need to maintain and repair the car.

(Above) When he’s not busy predicting and creating the weather, Nate Lehman lends a hand wherever he can. Here he’s sewing wheel covers for Continuum. We saw roles blending more and more as the days of mock race progressed.

All race activities are spent on the open road and away from many of the creature comforts we’re all accustomed to. Long days of racing, long nights of work, no showers, and rocky ground will wear you thin after a week on the road.
(Above) Chris Hammond from the electrical division looked especially tired.

(Above) Jeff Ferman with the strategy division was strangely and consistently energetic.

(Above) Gerald Giarmo with the electrical division.

(Above) Sarah Napier with the electrical division. Keep in mind that it was 50 degrees F out in the morning.
(Above) Steve Hechtman from the micro electrical division is also one of our three drivers.

(Above) Brooke Bailey and Deanna O’Clair from our operations division cleaned dishes every morning. (Above) Kristine Cramer from our mechanical division.

(Above) Nate Lehman with our strategy division.

This was a great test run for the Continuum team. The next few weeks will be packed with repairs, practice, and improvements that will build off of the experience we gathered over the last week. We’ve already completed more pre-race test miles than any of the past three Michigan teams so we’re excited to hit the road in Darwin next month. Go Blue! Brian

We’re three days into our mock race and Continuum has already run 1400 kilometers of our 2400 kilometer course. Our first three days on the Stuart Highway have been a definite departure from our testing on tracks and roads in the US. Road trains, 40+ degrees Celsius temperatures, increased solar radiation, and straight/flat roads are just the beginning. It has been great to see Continuum operate in its true habitat. Our array loves the Australian sun, the car remains stable in the constant cross winds, and the telemetry system continues to relay vital information to our chase vehicle. While calibrating and tuning different systems on the car, we’ve been troubleshooting our windowed fairing system as well as some unexpected steering feedback. We’ve spent a lot of time on the side of the road working through tire changes and small repairs, many of which are coming with the use of new components since arriving in Australia. The engineers are paying special attention to our front suspension & wheel motor to help understand what’s happening.

Our campsite is located just off the side of the road approximately 200 km South of the Northern Territory/South Australia border. Operations has found a field that’s clear of all rocks and brush, leaving a clean sheet of powdery red soil for all our equipment, vehicles, and tents. This seemed like the perfect site until winds picked up from the east, carrying clouds of red dust and depositing it in everything…cars, the semi, our eyes, our food, literally everything. Our yellow shirts are now mostly orange. Conditions became so harsh and the sky was so clouded with red dirt that charging was rendered nearly useless well before sunset. After finishing dinner, we saw that all our cups had gathered a small pile of sand at the bottom. Good thing that the punch was already red.

When it’s not sand it’s bugs and there are plenty here. The tent where we work on the car’s array is covered inside and out with gnats and moths, so many that they’re almost causing as large of a problem as the sand outside. Many of the systems within Continuum require clean, stable working environments for proper maintenance and we’re quickly learning how hard that is to achieve in the outback.

Our drivers are catching much needed rest after long days in Continuum. All are doing well even after spending up to 5 hours in the car at a time. With no air conditioning and temperatures reach as high as 40 degrees Celsius during the day this is a rather impressive feat!

We’re very fortunate to have the company of Trevor and Ann Marie Philbey during another trip across the Outback. Trevor is driving our prime mover for the third time since 2001 while Ann Marie prepares amazing food for the whole race crew every day.

We still have a ways to go so we’re looking forward to passing along more updates as the days progress.

GO BLUE!

Today marks the finish of our first week here in Adelaide. After a few long days of work on Continuum, our shop at Prince Alfred College became a home away from home for the whole crew. Continuum occupies the majority of our floor space, its bottom and top halves sitting side by side. A line of desks and computers sit on the far side of the shop immediately facing Continuum’s solar array. The rest of our space is littered with tool boxes, work benches, crates of equipment, and piles of fleet vehicle hardware. The metal and woodshops at PAC have been put to good use by our members and the limited parking space near our building has been filled with Holden vehicles.

Days start at about 7am and last until 11pm with short breaks for lunch and dinner. We’re fortunate to have a strong operations division to keep everyone well fed & rested while still outfitting fleet vehicles with inverters, light bars, radios, computers, and storage fixtures. The engineering division spends their time working on Continuum’s solar array, completing spare parts, and maintaining a handful of the countless systems on the lower surface. The majority of the strategy division spends their days in front of computers (7 so far) working on their strategy software

The race crew has been welcomed by a handful of familiar faces from past visits to Australia. Bob Allan has returned for his 6th World Solar Challenge with Michigan (which is every time we’ve visited Oz since 1990). In addition to his decades of experience with weather prediction and communications hardware, Bob has brought his son, Tim, to join the 2007 race caravan as well. Roscoe Shelton welcomed a hungry race crew into his house for an amazing barbeque and will be providing us with the tents we’ll call home while in the Outback. Phil McLaughlin and Paul Balestrin have ensured that we’re well taken care of here at PAC. While Trevor Philbey gets ready a week of driving our semi during testing, Ann Philbey is working with operations to arrange meals for our time in the Outback. Chito Garcia, our long time advisor and mentor, has developed many of these Australian relationships over his 15 years of racing with the Team. Despite living in Saline, MI and working for the University as a machinist for 20 years, you would swear that he’s a local to Adelaide. Everyone seems to know him here. I’m not even kidding, as he even had coffee with the mayor—a personal friend—just this last weekend.

Boxes are arriving, wires are being soldered, generators are running, glue is drying, programs are running, and schedules are compressing. A few critical components stand between us and a race ready vehicle and we’ll be spending the next few days clearing these last hurdles. This is definitely an exciting time for the Continuum Team.

Day 8:

Wake up at the South Australian border. Pretty chilly this morning, once again around 10 degrees C. Speed limit in South Australia is only 110 kph (68 mph) as opposed to 130 kph (80 mph) in the Northern Territory. Less petrol, but slows things down. Drive for a couple hours, reach Cadney Homestead, the 5th control stop for the WSC. 1.5 more hours of driving and we reach Coober Pedy, the Opal Capital of the world. Attractions include opal mine tours, opal shops (the local stuff is primarily white opal, the rest is brought in from out of town), an abandoned movie spaceship, a golf course without grass, the first tree in Coober Pedy (welded from scrap iron from a burned out mine truck), and a non functional 30 foot tall winch called – The Big Winch. There are numerous warning sounds about deep open mine shafts, with graphic stick figure descriptions of all the horrible things that will happen to you if you walk backwards into one. Many of the residents live underground in homes that are decidedly modern, but bored into the local sandstone. Living underground has the advantage of eliminating the need for AC in the desert. The town’s name is based on the aboriginal “kupa piti”, apparently meaning “white men’s holes”.

We visit the Big Winch, which is exactly what it sounds like (it is, however on a hill that nicely overlooks the town). At the base of the Big Winch is the twisted metal handle form an older Big Winch, which was apparently destroyed by a cyclone in the 80s. Meet an eccentric, but very friendly, gentleman originally from Hong Kong who shows us his opal shop and rather interesting collection of original, junk-based sculpture. Down the hill to visit the Old Timer’s Mine, an opal mine from 1916 that’s been turned into a museum. The museum also features an exhibit of an underground home and memorabilia from the town’s past, including a sign for the movie theater warning patrons not to bring their explosives inside. The gentleman running the gift shop was very interested in solar cars and we chatted for awhile. Quick lunch and back to the Track.

Primary feature on the road in the area is the conical piles of dirt from the opal mines. Otherwise pretty flat and rocky desert. We enter the Woomera Prohibited Area, a missile testing range which covers an area about as big a Florida – the Stuart Highway itself is unrestricted, but apparently has been closed occasionally for missile shots. We clear the area after 250 km when we reach Glendambo, the 6th control stop. The road turns east along the southern border of the Prohibited Area. We make a shot visit to Lake Hart, a large dry lake which is currently a salt flat. We walk a couple hundred yards out onto the salt, but stop when we see a sign that reads “LASER HAZARD – LIVE ORDNANCE – NO TRESSPASS” so we turn around. Beat a hasty retreat through the clouds of flies (which are annoying but don’t seem to bite) and get back on the road.

With the sun setting, we turn off the Track to visit the town of Woomera, the base for the missile range. The town is, appropriately, named after an aboriginal spear throwing device. The Australian military did a great deal of ballistic missile research and weapons testing at this site, including nuclear tests, especially in the ’50s and ’60s. Australia launched its first satellite from Woomera in 1967. The area is pretty quiet now, though they still launch a few sounding rockets. The town features a missile park with an outdoor display of many of the rockets launched at Woomera, including the crashed first stage of the Redstone rocket that launched the first Australian satellite (some locals found it in the desert in 1990). There is also a nightly astronomy presentation, except on Tuesdays.

It’s Tuesday, so we head back to the Stuart Highway and have dinner at Spud’s Road House (where they kindly ask you to pay for gas at the bar). Have a steak sandwich “with the lot”, which apparently means, “all the salads, bacon (somewhere between American and Canadian bacon), cheese, and a fried egg”. Pretty tasty – Nate’s “mixed grill” is equally impressive, consisting of steak, beef sausage, bacon, and the requisite fried egg with a tossed salad and macaroni salad. Cholesterol does not count in the Outback.

Stop for our last night in the Outback just south of Pimba (home of Spud’s and not much else). Cold again, but thankfully no wind. Two games of euchre (Mike and I soundly defeat Nate and David – Nate and Mike had done the same to David and I the night before).

Day 9:

From Pimba it’s only an hour or so to Port Augusta, the final control stop. I see a strange bald man poking around the car. Turns out it’s Mike. Fields of winter wheat on both sides of the road, with some nice rolling hills. They look sort of like the default desktop background in Windows XP. Nice view of the Spencer Gulf. Hills will be tricky for the solar car (Momentum ran out of juice in this area in 2005). See an interesting waterway colored pink from the salts. Actually see some civilization on the road every now and then. We’re back in Adelaide in the afternoon with time for some food and a visit to Bob’s. Back to the hostel where we unexpectedly meet a nice group of guys from Solar Car Team Twente, a Dutch solar car team that is very much cooler in every way than Nuon. They promise to meet us again in Darwin. Off to bed, where we are awoken around 3 AM by the rest of the team arriving.

This concludes the narrative of route survey – obviously we have a lot more interesting stories that I don’t have room for here, but feel free to ask questions in the comments or shoot me an email at garrickw@umich.edu. I’ll try to update these posts with pictures, so check back occasionally if you’re interested.

Cheers,

Garrick

The Weather Team took a giant step forward towards being completely prepared for the upcoming race. After a couple of days of work, and a lot of help from some friendly locals, Weather 1 (the primary weather vehicle) is completely outfitted and race ready. We now have an operational mobile weather station that even the National Weather Service would be jealous of. Mounted atop what has now been dubbed “The Thunder Box” we have more instrumentation than any U of M Solar Team has ever had. A few of the things that you will find affixed to this years weather vehicle are the WeatherHawk 510 weather station, the antenna for the IMet-3100 base station, a RM Young anemometer, an egg-beater antenna, an Eppley pyronometer, and a couple of other communications antennas, and storage for AirGas Great Lakes helium tanks and all of the rest of our “toys”. It was a lot of fun to put the finishing touches on the car and now we are filled with anticipation and are itching to get on the road with the team and try it all out.
One of the few remaining bugs that we are currently trying to work out is Australia’s form of our F.A.A., C.A.S.A.. Flight restrictions are far more strict than what I had anticipated, and so we are running into a little bump in the road with getting clearance to launch the Kaymont weather balloons and radiosondes that we received from InterMet Systems and the UAV that we had planned on using. Everyone that we have talked to thus far seems very open to the idea and are willing to work with us, so we are conservatively optimistic about the situation.
As soon as we receive final clearance from C.A.S.A., we will begin testing and tuning this setup to make sure it will stand up to the rigors of a 3000 kilometer race. If all goes well, we will undoubtedly have a setup that will turn a lot of heads and set the curve as to what will be considered acceptable for a weather vehicle.
I will be sure to keep you updated when we do begin testing, hopefully in just a few short days!

Let me start out by saying that cooking for 30 people is difficult. Correction: very difficult. I have no idea what the chefs in the residence hall cafeterias go through with cooking for thousands, but I definitely appreciate their work all the more.

For instance, for yesterday’s dinner of sloppy joes (which no one in Australia has heard of, by the way), we cooked seven pounds of beef. SEVEN POUNDS! In addition to that, we had to make vegetarian burgers for our vegetarians and half a pound of turkey for those who can’t eat dark meat. We also had to mix sloppy joe sauce from scratch without our measuring cups; they were forgotten in the semi trailer at Prince Alfred College. We’ve made sure to throw those in the car for the next meal, though.

On top of the pure volume of food that we’re making for lunch and dinner, the food here is pretty bland. So far we’ve taken note that the cheeses, pancakes, and vegetarian burgers here aren’t as flavorful as those in the U.S. Some food also goes by slightly different names (i.e. Kraft Macaroni Cheese instead of Macaroni and Cheese), and we’ve had to learn that biscuits refer to cookies and “tasty” cheese is American cheese. Through our many trips to the grocery store we’ve seen that pop is expensive, they have a wider variety of juice flavors (apple blackcurrant was a hit), and regular customers don’t really appreciate when you continuously buy out the bread and bun section.

All in all, we’ve been doing rather well menu-wise; we’ve had sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, chicken tacos, sloppy joes, spaghetti… It takes a bit longer than simple PB&J and pasta every day, but it’s worth the effort. And thankfully tonight we’ll get a break from cooking since Roscoe—a long-time friend and sponsor of the Team—is throwing us a barbecue.

That’s all I have for now – time to go organize the semi trailer!

Day 6:

Day breaks warm and humid in Darwin. We replace the broken inverter with a beefier unit purchased at Bunnings (essentially Home Depot). Mike does 3 victory laps at a nearby traffic circle. Purchase petrol and a selection of automotive fuses. Find the start location after some searching (route book is not terribly specific, though it will probably e rather more obvious on race day). Head out after a bit of fiddling with the gps units and we’re off on the official race route at about 11 AM. Roll through the Darwin urban area and start climbing the hills out of town. Hit the steepest hill on the route, Hayes Creek Hill, 173 kilometers out. Doesn’t look too bad (fans of Momentum will recall that the hill south of Port Augusta near the end of the race is quite a bit tougher). See a few more brush fires and smoldering patches in the trees lining the highway.

We reach Katherine, the first control stop on the race. At 318 km along the route, Continuum should reach this point late in the morning of the first day if all is going smoothly. We pass Mataranka, site of some famous hot springs, and also where, by any luck, we’ll be clear of the clouds from the ocean to the north. It’s been clear today from Darwin on. Continuing south, the trees start to thin out. Make a brief visit to Daly Waters, a small community consisting primarily of a petrol stop, campground, and a well-known pub with memorabilia (ranging from souvenir trinkets to ladies undergarments) from visitors around the world. One of these includes a large decal of the University of Michigan seal.

Next control stop is Dunmarra, at 633 km. We eat some sandwiches and are accosted by about half a dozen begging stray dogs. We toss them some bread on the way out. Vegetation consists primarily of low scrub and small trees about as high as a person. This area south of Dunmarra will likely be where the team will stop for the first night on the race, so we begin scanning the road for suitable pull-offs and camping sites. We see a very large, flat, low cloud in the distance to the south, which Nate determines to be a cloud formed around smoke particles from the brush fires. We pull off at a parking area at around 800 km from Darwin, just as the sun is starting to set.

We decide to shave Mike’s head. For those unfamiliar with Mike, he’s a jolly Armenian fellow with a rather bushy head of curly hair and a similarly bushy beard. After some time and judicious application of scissors, electric clippers, and razors, Mike’s head is smooth as a baby’s. We determine that he has a well shaped, dome like head, and the look is approved.

Leaving the headlights on to shave Mike and read in the car has drained the battery, and, as of around 10 PM, the car won’t start. Without much to do about it at that point, we go to sleep.

Day 7:

Day breaks, and the car starts up. We give thanks for lead-acid chemistry. Back on the road, we fuel up at Renner Springs and then proceed to the third control stop, Tennant Creek at 988 km from Darwin. We should hit this point sometime in the morning of the second day of the race.

We stop and spend the morning climbing the Devil’s Marbles, an amazing formation of rounded red boulders. These formed due to natural erosion of a granite slab formed 1.7 billion years ago from an upwelling of magma into the surrounding sandstone. Cracks in the granite allowed water to seep in, eroding the boulders which were further shaped by wind erosion. The resulting formations look as if someone has stacked rounded rocks on top of each other.

We fuel again at Wycliffe Well, which is notable mostly because it was the site of numerous UFO sightings. The roadhouse is decorated with various aliens, copies of old newspaper articles, and a greeting sign that reads “humans also welcome”. Two little green men wave from a conical spacecraft that appear to have been constructed primarily from old radio antenna parts. We suspect that the Outback might loosen a few screws after too many years of living in the bush.

Just south of Wycliffe, we hit a section of road that is perfectly straight. For 42 km. Some slight undulations in elevation, but the car is otherwise traveling in a straight line for over 20 minutes. There’s not much out here in the Outback. We pass the Aileron roadhouse, notable for a very large statue (even bigger than the koala – see comments to Part I) of an aboriginal man walking on a hill behind the roadhouse. Otherwise its pretty desolate out here.

We reach Alice Springs, the midpoint of the race, at midday. Alice Springs, at about 1500 km from Darwin, will be a “stage stop” in the 2007 WSC, meaning that all vehicles will be held at the stage stop for a day and then re-released in the order they arrived. The fastest teams could be reaching Alice Springs late on the second day of the race, with the rest of the pack arriving on the third day. This puts an interesting wrinkle into strategy, as we will likely have most of Tuesday, October 23 to sit in Alice Springs charging the battery from the sun as we wait for the Wednesday restart.

We get back on the road in the afternoon after restocking our food supplies. About 130 km to the south of Alice, we turn off onto a very rough dirt road to visit the Henbury Meteorite Craters. We arrive after 15 km of washboard roads, washed-out dips, and dodging wandering cows. The craters are the remains of the 4000 year old impact of a meteorite about the size of a fuel drum. The meteor broke into 4 large and many smaller pieces in the atmosphere, and the Henbury site we visited is the location of the 4 main strikes. The craters are quite fascinating – the largest crater is about 180 m across and 15 m deep. It is actually two craters which formed close enough together that the wall between them was destroyed in the impact. Two smaller craters from the other two large pieces of the meteorite flank the main crater. Erosion has worn down the lips of the craters, leaving small valleys with a great deal of vegetation (water collects in the basins, forming a small ecosystem unique in the area). Apparently Apollo astronauts visited these craters in preparation for the moon landings.

After rejoining the highway, we continue south, passing Kulgera and reaching the border between the Northern Territory and South Australia. We set up camp and go to sleep after a little bit of “now I’m in NT – now I’m in SA” hopping about.

-Garrick

More on route survey, as promised. I’ll forewarn you that for some reason the display at the hostel computer is entirely in Japanese, except for this typing window, so things might get dicey.

Day 3:

Awoke early to a breakfast of toast and tea at the hostel. Group heads out and we make our first stop at Dick Smith’s electronics to grab an inverter (one of the key pieces of equipment stuck in customs) and some miscellaneous other electronic bits. We then go to Flinders camping to meet Roscoe Shelton, a longtime Australian friend of the team. Roscoe treats us to coffee, gives us our bearings a bit on the Stuart Highway (“The Track”), and kindly asks “what happened on the gridiron on Saturday?”. I had hoped we’d gotten far enough away from Ann Arbor to escape that, but it’s a small world these days. Roscoe sends us off with some good advice and a pair of two person tents for the trip. Next stop is at the shop of Bob Allan, another longtime contributor to the team and weather / communications equipment guru. We unpack a bit of our excess luggage, get some more sage advice, and get in touch with Chris Selwood, director of the WSC. He agrees to meet us back at Roscoe’s to deliver the official route book, which has just arrived hot of the press. After a brief lunch at McDonald’s (which is basically the same here, although they do offer a burger with egg), we stop back at Roscoe’s to pick up the book. I should note that Roscoe, Bob, and Chris are all fine chaps with many good stories, so this process actually took somewhere around 5 hours all told. With all that settled, we booted up the computer and began the official route survey in Victoria Square in the heart of downtown Adelaide.

We drove north until about 10 PM, with a stop at the Big W and also Woolworth’s in Port Augusta (the last WSC control stop) for supplies (lunchmeat, bread, PBJ, water, a cooler, a shovel, TP, etc.). We stop in the pitch dark (the stars are clouded over) at a barren little rest pull-off just north of Pimba. Mike and Dave can’t take the cold (it’s below 12 C) and sleep in the car (an arrangement which will continue throughout the trip). Nate and I brave the gale force winds and tie the tent to the car to keep it from blowing away. Lightning flashes ominously in the distance.

Day 4:

We awake early to the sunrise and a great view of Island Lagoon, a huge dry lake that stretches to our south (this particular stretch of the highway runs mostly east-west). Enjoy? a quick meal of frosted flakes in the blustery conditions. Standing with back to the wind prevents frosted flakes from blowing off spoon.

Route survey continues north toward Glendambo, the next control stop, with Mike at the helm and Dave manning the survey computer. Arrive at Glendambo roadhouse without incident, press on without stopping as gas guage is still over 3/4. Inverter pops and smells of smoke. Pull off on the side of the road, repairs unsuccessful. After a brief conference, we determine to press on without the inverter, losing the ability to collect GPS data. Will buy an inverter at the earliest opportunity (not too many electronic stores in the outback). This is not too much of a problem, as the return trip GPS data is what will actually be used.

100 km to Coober Pedy, vehicle display shows a remaining range rather smaller than that. No gas stations between here and there. Mike reduces speed to save petrol, but range is still lower than remaining distance. We coast to a stop and remove the luggage from the roof rack to reduce aerodynamic drag. Only a minor improvement in range outlook, so we proceed with AC off at 80 kph. Somewhere just past the sign indicating 20 km to Coober Pedy, range remaining reads zero with the gas needle on empty, but the car is still running. I’m pretty sure I see a wedge-tailed eagle circling. We decide that 2 of us will start walking when the car stops and 2 will stay with the car. We get out the sat phones to stay in contact.

Somehow the car makes it to Coober Pedy (source of something like 90% of the world’s opal), sputtering a little bit as we pull up to the gas station. We fill up and eat a quick lunch of sandwiches and red dust just north of town. Continue to drive, crossing border into the Northern Territory. Pull into Alice Springs, the biggest town between Adelaide and Darwin and the halfway point of the route, around 6 PM, shortly before sunset. Everything apparently closes at 6, so no luck with the inverter. Dinner at KFC. Nate asks nicely and gets a free extra chicken wing with his “ultimate burger meal” (Aussies call basically any hot meat sandwich that isn’t a steak sandwich a “burger” apparently, so a chicken burger is just a grilled or breaded chicken breast sandwich). Press on northward for a couple more hours, stopping at Ryan Well, a mid 1800s stock watering well. Wind is much less than last night, and the rocks are somewhat less sharp.

Day 5:

A lot of driving. Pass through Tennant Creek and Katherine. Large brushfires create low hanging smoke clouds, which is the closest thing to weather we’ve seen since the first night (weatherman Nate is bored). Actually see some smoldering/burning trees on both sides of the road. Pull into Darwin in the evening, stop briefly at our hostel. Wash off two and a half days of dirt. Walk downtown for dinner at the Hog’s Breath Cafe, experience burgers with beetroot. Sleep on something other than rocks.

The first crew to arrive in Australia, consisting of myself, David Elmquist, Mike Kezelian, and Nate Lehman, arrived September 4 in Melbourne to complete a GPS survey of the WSC route. Jeff Ferman accompanied us as far as Sydney, then took a side trip to Perth. Having just come in from the bush 2 days ago, I thought I’d take the opportunity to update you on the results of the survey. This will likely come in a couple installments, hence the “Part I”.

Day 1:

Arrive in Melbourne ~9:45 AM local time. Clear customs with no troubles. Mike and I grab a cab to Holden headquarters, where we pick up our vehicle – a light blue, 6 cylinder, AWD, 7 seat Adventura wagon. After getting a crash course in Australian driving (stay on the left, mates), we head out, or at least try, as apparently I managed to get the parking brake stuck. Mike puts his weight into it and we’re off. Immediately embarrass myself by activating the windshield wipers rather than the turn indicator (the levers are reversed). Mike takes over driving, with no further incidents sans a couple of clipped curbs (that whole wrong side of the car thing again). Arrive back at airport. Stack an absurd number of duffel bags onto the roof rack, load up and head out. Take a wrong turn. Arrive back at airport. Drive off toward the freight forwarder to receive our weather gear that was shipped via air freight. Road listed in Google directions does not exist. Turn around. Arrive back at airport. Ask for directions at gas station. No worries mate, head out towards freight forwarder. Determine that Google directions hopelessly out of date.

Finally arrive at freight forwarder, drop off customs documents. Will return to pick up gear in morning once it clears customs. Visit Big W (Wal-Mart, down here), buy an atlas. Drive to downtown Melbourne and make a short visit to OmniStar, who have generously agreed to loan us 2 high-accuracy GPS units for our survey. Arrive at the hostel, the Pint on Punt, at around 6 PM. Enjoy $10 steak night at the pub on the first floor, then promptly fall asleep at 8:30 PM.

Day 2:

Head to the shopping mall in the morning, purchase SIM cards, pillow, soap. Enjoy lunch – for myself, a mix kebab with all the salads and doner sauce (This roughly translates to a chicken and lamb pita wrap with lettuce, tomato, and onion (all the salads), with a mayo-like lamb (doner) sauce). David is laughed at by food court staff for asking what “tasty” is (it’s “american” cheese). Visit freight forwarder, learn that shipment is being held by customs and won’t be released until the car crate arrives. Decide to strike out for Adelaide and complete route survey without weather gear. Hit the road, see some great landscapes, beautiful stars (when it gets pitch dark at 7 PM). Arrive at Adelaide hostel (Cannon St. Backpackers) at 10:30 Adelaide time, promptly fall asleep.

This concludes Part I – we’ll get days 3, 4, and possibly 5 in the next installment, later today.

Cheers,

Garrick

Hey Everyone!!

The entire Team was once again brought together at the Cannon Street Backpackers (where we will be staying until we travel to Darwin mid-October) after the last group arrived in Melbourne yesterday afternoon. After a good night’s sleep we all drove to the Prince Alfred College to begin our first day of work down under. Our Team was provided with an amazing fleet of cars from Holden which allow us all to travel together with luggage and all. These are also the vehicles that will be used throughout the race. Once we arrived at the college, we spent most of the day setting up our work area and emptying out the crate and semi trailer.

The work area provided for us is great and everyone we meet is always interested in hearing about our Team and helping out anyway they can. The school that we are staying at actually competes in a Solar Cycle competition each year. It’s amazing to see how close the final body of their High School Team’s bike is to final body of our car.

Everything in the crate and semi was shipped safe and soundly from the U.S. and was cleared though customs without any problems. Unfortunately after unloading the crate and organizing the semi, we found a few items that were left behind. Thankfully, our home-operations Team is able and ready to find and ship everything that we’re missing.

Thanks for reading, be sure to look for more updates later this week and feel free to post your own comments and questions if you have any!!!