so far i’ve been really reluctant to take the disco onto deep sand tracks. the car is pretty heavy to begin with but to make it a greater challenge the land rover engineers fitted the discovery 4 with huge brakes (great) which means only 19″ (and bigger) wheels will fit over them. instead of the balloon type tyres so many off-road vehicles run disco drivers have skinny ones.
which is fantastic for on-road driving, less body roll etc. but when you have to run 20 psi instead of 38 there is less tyre left to protect the rim from any nasties sticking out of the sand.
but hey, it’s got to be done, right? what could possibly go wrong … so today we took the disco on a little side-trip on west cape howe national park.
you may be interested to know that cape howe was not named by matthew flinders, but by the big man captain cook himself. apparently he really wanted to immortalize the treasurer of the british navy; how many accountants have a cape named after them?
the track was actually pretty good, maybe a bit soft in some places. steep too. the disco performed flawlessly, i only had to drop the tyre pressure a little further in one spot. but there was always the shovel and the maxtrax as backup. and two passengers to push if required … ok maybe not. nat wasn’t happy anyway, she claimed she was getting seasick back there.
how often can you look down on a rainbow? a nice circular one, too? sometimes it pays to stand outside in the drizzle (the girls were having lunch in the car). that’s shelley beach down there. no idea who that was named after but wikipedia mentions that the main assassins spider – endangered – is endemic to the area. we didn’t see any.
shelley beach – from the beach. the water looked inviting but wasn’t. too cold.
ok this might be getting boring, but these beaches really know how to turn it up. we caught a rare break in the rain / drizzle. the weather has not been great here the last week or so, while the rest of australia is in the grips of a heat wave – there is a massive bushfire near sydney.
could be worse, it could be raining when we bush camp next (in a few days, just outside margaret river). plus i had to complete an assignment anyway, so the weather didn’t make too much of a difference to me.
and we now know the disco is sand-ready. great!