25-Jul-2001 -- My wife Grace and I had planned to go to this confluence on our fortnightly shopping trip from home at Torrens Creek to Charters Towers (funnily, although fortnight is in common usage in Australia it's become very rare in the USA). We had some overnight rain the night before but it was only enough to scare the gauge, not actually register anything. We left home at 06:00 in the dark to get the 50km to Pentland before turning on to the dirt road that hopefully would lead us very close to the confluence. Of course what is becoming common for me is to get a rock in my windscreen whenever passing a road train and this trip was no exception; life with triple roadtrains is very hard on windscreens.

After about 70km heading south-east on the dirt road it got quite confusing as it entered the property 'Longdon' but seeing some farmhands about and talking to them they gave me some simple directions to help me find it and get out again on the far side. I'm sure they don't really know what I meant by confluence hunter, but never mind.

We drove a further 13km down the track and found that we were 110 metres away, damn! I had to walk off the road but not far, certainly my closest yet.

The confluence had a lot of trees about which made getting a stable fix a bit too difficult for my patience. As I took a shot of the GPS it naturally dipped a latitude point at the very moment I snapped even though it had sat there on zeros happily for 1/2 a minute before I took the shot.

Anyway, with the confluence found, it was 08:15 and time to leave and do our shopping, 60 more km of dirt and another 60 of bitumen and we could do our shopping before driving 160km home again, naturally I also hit a rock after the confluence that destroyed a bolt that holds the suspension together on the car, now I'll have to use the internet to hunt that down as well.

Life would be remote here without the internet and satellite TV.