Wide Open – Days 37-39 – Hibernation

29 June – 1 July 2026 – 0 kms – Broken Hill

Wiljakali Country

Well, it turns out it’s SAM’s fault. When things go poorly or not as planned, there’s always got to be someone to blame. Or some thing. Humans need to make sense of things, to know why things happened. We need closure and understanding. And to do that, to make complex things simple, we need someone to blame – think migrants taking jobs or houses or doing other things the data does not support.

So I’m blaming SAM. SAM screwed with me in spring 2022, also.

It turns out that one of the reasons it’s been so rainy in June is that the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) has been in a phase that keeps the high pressure systems to the south of the continent. This is one of the reasons we’ve had so many windy days and will have windy days the rest of the trip. Even when it’s not raining and there’s a high pressure system influencing the weather, we are never directly under that high to get the warm, calm days you normally associate with a high. We are sitting at the top of the high which is directly strong easterlies until the next front brings its westerlies and its rain. See more here: https://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/wet-week-ahead-for-southeastern-australia/1891429

And here is the ABC report: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-27/heavy-rain-australia-east-as-el-nino-weather/106848044

The weather forecasts are not wrong. It rains a bunch on Monday, takes a bit of a break on Tuesday and then pours again on Wednesday.

One of the joys of living in, or visiting, Broken Hill or points north is that radar coverage ends just north of town. So it’s really anyone’s guess if there is rain coming or not when it’s coming from the north in Broken Hill. If you live north of town, you’ve got to go old school and stand on your verandah and make judgements for yourself. This blackspot can be more than just an annoyance: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-18/far-west-nsw-doppler-weather-radar-blackspot/106780700

I go out early to do laundry on Wednesday. There is no rain on the radar to the north, but I can see the big mass of black clouds coming. I have very good timing and get back from doing laundry just as the rain dumps down.

One of the things I noticed last week when I was here was that the skatepark had the best potential I’ve seen in Oz for some good ‘skate wheel car’ action. You may recall my dad made really cool little cars out of roller skates that we had fun with at the skate park in Salida. I’ve never seen another skatepark that had a center jump over here. But Broken Hill has one!

So I thought a nice way to break up 3 days of sitting around a motel room feeling sorry for myself and hibernating a whole lot would be to find a vehicle I could strap the guys to and send down the ramps. I give myself a $20 budget. My greatest hope would be a skateboard or similar from Kmart. Unfortunately, the store in Broken Hill doesn’t carry sporting equipment – the store is absolutely crammed full of stuff, but not that stuff.

I finally find a little VW camper at a cheapo shop for $10. I don’t have much confidence in it, because the wheels are light and plastic. But it will at least be fun for a try when the rains pause on Tuesday, and I can leave the toy behind for some lucky kid to find it.

Yeah, the wheels are crappy enough the guys just slide out before they can get to the hump for a jump. I give them about 10 runs before we head back to the motel and leave the van on a park bench. Amazingly, they never have a roll-over. My dad’s cars would have been so much fun here!

Now what are we going to do – where are we going to go? The livetraffic website is not encouraging.

Broken Hill ends up getting 27.6mm (1.09 inches) over the three days. For the month, it gets 39.4mm. It’s June average is 15.7mm – so more than twice as much as normal.

Menindee gets 48.8mm over the three days. It normally gets about 21mm over 5 days in total in June. So no, this amount of rain is not normal. I’m just an unlucky person.

I look at Wilcannia and it got 34.8mm over the three days. Damn.

I decide that anything to the north is just not going to work on this tour. That means we’re not going to Wilcannia to access Gundabooka National Park (park roads there had been closed for over a week after the last lot of rain, and had only been opened to 4WDs before this lot of rain, so will likely be closed too long after this rain for me to get up there and then get home by the 18th, or even by the time the next rain comes).

So what can we do?

I decide we’ll ride back through all the “Bored Out Of My Skull” (BOOMS) Darling Riverine Plain scenery again and get to Pooncarie. We’ll wait for a few days there to see if the dirt roads reopen to the east. If they do, we’ll head toward Ivanhoe, Hillston and points east and south to get home. This is the best I can come up with given the conditions and the huge dump of rain everywhere has just gotten.

I set my alarm for sparrow’s gurgle. Pooncarie is 240 kms from Broken Hill. There is rain forecast in the late afternoon tomorrow. But there should also be a pretty good tailwind once we start heading south. So the plan is to get up super early and ride until it gets dark or we meet the rain and then camp wherever that may be.

(I’m writing up this journal page on 30 July. I see the terrible news this morning. Glen Hansard has died in a motorbike accident in Dublin. How heartbreaking. He had ‘the roar’. I linked to a video of one of his songs on Day 13 of this journal.

I happened to choose the movie “Once” as something to watch on a flight to America in 2008, and that is how I got into him. So below is the Grammy-nominated song from that film as a tribute to him – one of us that had ‘the roar’).