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Post-script to the Final Ride: A Long Way 'Home', and Settling into Pepper-Packin'

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  Hello, Sorry for the delay, the long-suffering keyboard has finally give up the ghost... I am typing with an onscreen one.  The word 'onscreen' just then took approx 1 minute to write. Anyway, this is the post-final-ride final ride.  The one that takes us up to where we will be living and working for the next 6 months.  We left Phil and Karolina after a week in Surfers Paradise, with the tanned surf boys running about barefoot and the skimpily clad promoter-girls in bikinis and gold platforms.   We meandered along an alternative route back up north to Ayr on some very good dirt tracks.     They were places where even the 8-year olds wore cowboy hats, where the service station women stop just short of actually growling at you, and where homesteads were called things like 'Why Not'.  (As far as I was concerned there were some very good answers to that. They included '1. snakes', '2. wretched desert', '3. total lack of drink...
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The Final Ride: Outback Worries and Conspiring Elves

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On a rainy, rainy day I watched a leather-skinned old Aussie fellow hitch his denim shorts back up over his buttocks. He was stumbling about in an enormous cowboy hat outside his trailer. We were at the Darwin BP garage. It was starting to rain. It didn’t matter. Spirits were undrenchable.  We had manoeuvred our lazy bums back onto the bike and were on our way again. We sped through the storm, got as soaked as an Australian on ANZAC day, and left the rain clouds behind. The rocks turned red again, the sky turned blue, and the gearbox seal started leaking oil. At Adelaide River the oil left a worrying slick. We rode on. At Pine Creek we found some folks. They told us the gearbox seal was leaking oil. We smiled serenely, and rode on. At Larrimah an Italian in a pink shirt suggested it was a problem with the chain. We muttered. And rode on. Then we found the Pink Panther. The Pink Panther is a strange old ramshackle trailer park motel, complete with a miniature croc...
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The Saint from Darwin

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We woke up to a loud knocking.  An enormous neon-clad postman was struggling with a very heavy box.  It had arrived!!  We leapt around the room for a few minutes, singing.  Then we realised there was a Frenchman asleep in the next room who possibly mightn't be quite as excited about the arrival of a second-hand gearbox, so we sat down quietly and opened it. Adrian The Workshop-Saint rang about twenty minutes later to say the workshop was available, and within the hour Theo was driving us and a gearbox across town in his funky cow-painted van.  At the workshop the gearbox went on beautifully smoothly, excepting the sneaky ignition switch.  It had decided it wasn't going to move from the old gearbox to the new one, so we persuaded it, with force.  All seemed well and good, and we started on the shaft. bit of a difference... Its a bloody good job Adrain reappeared at this point, to help get the driveshaft sorted, because we weren't gett...
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