So I went on another night time drive, this time I didn't really see a lot that I wanted to photograph but that's OK, that's not really the point of the trip. The plain simple truth is that I just like going for a drive.
I pushed myself a bit far this time though and I'll be a bit more careful and plan better in the future. I spent 9 hours driving and at the end of it I was starting to get tired and inattentive. That's never happened to me before but my sleep patterns have been so messed up the last few years that in hindsight I guess it should have been expected.
I'm still really pleased with my little car, so quiet and economical. I did 750 Km on just over 40 litres of fuel.
It was interesting to see how farms are faring in our state's mid north, it's very arid country, mostly wheat farms. They've been in drought for 5 years and just had their first decent rains a couple of weeks ago. Some paddocks had been preplanted and were showing a good 3 inches of growth but farmers are being cautious and not all of them trust the weather to hold so many large paddocks have instead just been used as grazing lots for sheep and cattle.
And there were quite a few paddocks that had obviously been plowed and planted after the first rains, showing just a hint of green stubble in the flat brown earth. The farmer wasn't going to plant unless there was a chance of actually harvesting a crop. Just 100 Km further south all the farms are fully planted and everything's green everywhere but that's not the case in the mid north.
One thing that did catch my interest was a narrow little gorge that I drove through, Germein Gorge. It's very steep and very narrow and obviously prone to flash flooding going by the way that the road is constructed. Over 100 years ago this would have been a very important route for wheat farmers to get their wheat to a port, Port Germein. As such they couldn't afford for it to get washed out every time it rained.
The road runs alongside a creek all the way down, dry most of the year and for the whole length of the road, 27 Km, the people that built it lined the banks of the creek with dry stone wall that whole length. It was so tight and narrow that there was almost nowhere for me to stop the car safely and take pictures, so the picks I got aren't the best but do show what I'm talking about.
In some places this stone embankment was well over 5 metres high, where I found a place to stop the height was only a couple of feet. It's an amazing piece of work. I also noted that there has been a bit of damage to it over the years. In some areas they've tried to patch it up with concrete but it looks ugly and that concrete is already starting to crumble after just 50 years. They've obviously learnt lessons from that though because there's newer patches of repair work where they've built more stone wall just like the original.