Day two - now that was quite a day.

Off to an early start Sandra enjoyed a fast breakfast at the tradies' stop and concluded she knows why they die young! I reckon it's only a bit of grease - can't be that bad surely? anyway it was fast and after a quick fuel up of the bike we left Esperance around 8.00am right on schedule.

The road was wet for the first 80km or so with only very light drizzle falling on us, we were obviously following the showers north. Again the crops were looking much better than I had expected from what I'd heard - always good to see the 'cockies' doing well.

We rolled into Norseman after a couple of hours - still running on time and although it was cold I was feeling ok and the HD was of course, running perfectly. We stopped at the BP where we usually fill up for our interstate runs - the place was very quiet and it felt strange to not turn left/east after filling up.

It was here I noticed Sandra looked crook - especially when she asked me to buy pain killers. Apparently her expensive Arai full faced helmet is too heavy and was causing her a lot of neck pain as the bike hit the bumps on the road (of which there are a lot from Norseman north). We discussed her condition and she said if it didn't get better soon she may not be able to continue.

We met a local BMW rider while at the servo and shared a few yarns about bike trips, He seemed a good bloke so I invited him to the upcoming BMW ride out that way - hopefully he turns up.

I then had to get moving to Kalgoorlie where I had booked the bike in to the local Harley dealer to have a tire fitted at 12.30. As I gunned the machine north it hammered over the rough 'highway' and I squirmed on the front thinking of Sandra wincing in pain on the back.

The girl put up with the pain like a soldier and we ran into Kalgoorlie on time and with no stops. Nathan at Goldfields Bikeworks was there to meet us and said he would have to wait for the bike to cool down before working on it - I hadn't thought of that but it seemed fair enough.

We lunched at the nearby bakery (more healthy food!) and were back in the Bikeworks shop shortly thereafter to buy Sandra a lighter helmet. Being an HD dealer they had an array of open faced helmets. Sandra prefers the safety of full faced but they were all heavy. After I pointed out she was continually hurting herself to prevent getting hurt and that the heavy helmets hurt her even though she didn't fall off, she agreed to try one and now is the proud owner/wearer of the open faced and goggle/masked creation you see in the latest photos.

All of this took about 2.5 hours and put me behind schedule to make Leinster (another 360km) by nightfall. This lateness probably contributed to my decision not to fuel up in Kalgoorlie but instead to seek fuel at Menzies. Now I did have some recollection fuel supplies in the town were not reliable...

Menzies has a great little coffee shop called 'Achievable' and I was please to see its flags out so it was open as we rolled in. I said to the girl there the main thing was coffee, we would worry about fuel later.

Well, worry I did. The day was getting late when we pulled in to the servo to read the "no fuel on site" sign! The bike computer (yes Harleys have computers now) said I had fuel for 60km and the next town on the highway is Leonora, some 104 km away. A (very) quick run around town turned up no fuel but the girl at the Shire office suggested we should head for Kookynie which although off our track to the east, was only 60km away and sold fuel (only petrol) after hours. A quick call to Kevin at kookynie pub confirmed he still sells petrol and away we went - VERY, VERY SLOWLY to conserve every drop of fuel.

Sitting on around 80-90kmh we cruised up to the turn off and left the highway onto the Kookynie access road. All was going OK until the camera fell off! Well at least we didn't. Sandra was distressed and ran back from where we stopped to pick up the pieces. We found most of it but the micro SD card came out and even after about half an hour's searching we failed to spot it. If you're up that way keep an eye out for it!

Darkness was about to close in and we still had a fair way to go so I decided to forget about the little (tiny!) card and get going again. Fortunately I had uploaded the previous days images to this website and only lost one day's pics. There's a lesson in that - keep uploads current!

The fuel light had been on for some distance by the time we cautiously pulled up to the Kookynie pub fuel pump. I had memories of last year's trip on the KTM when I had run out of fuel about 2 km before the pub, only on that occasion I had carried spare fuel, not this time.

Kevin a Harley rider himself, remarked on the fact the bike took over 21.4 litres - 'you must have been low - 21 litres!' He said - he was right.

All gassed up and with Sandra having filmed the famous horse munching away, we roared off into the darkness up the dirt road backroad to Leonora. You save around 20km by taking the dirt and the HD ran along it OK, well it did after I let 15psi out of the front tire, before that it was a little drifty wasn't it Sandra?

At Leonora we pumped the front tire back up, grabbed a sandwich and started the run north to Leinster in darkness. I set the cruise control on 100, turned on all the auxiliary lights and plodded north enjoying the stillness of the evening and scanning for errant wildlife of which I saw none.

From Kookynie to Leinster is 275 km, all of which we did in the dark and I must say it was quite pleasant, we rumbled in to Leinster village at about 8.45pm and were glad to garb our room keys from the bottle shop before they closed. too late for a meal though, we would have to wait until the morning to sample the delights of the mess again.