Heading into the storm on the Barrier Highway towards Cobar

We’ve had a very steady day today as we’ve continued our eastward journey. At around 3am this morning the rain arrived and by the time we got up the rain was accompanied by thunder and lightning. It was fairly patchy though so we managed to get everything packed away and got ourselves sorted in the gaps between showers. Very glad we decided to put the fly sheet on the tent before we left Broken Hill or we might have got a bit wet !
As we headed east we were treated to displays of forked lightning in the distance, eventually catching up with the storm and passing through it with some very heavy rain along the way. The Land Rover is looking a little bit cleaner but not much…

Another view of the gathering storm clouds.

Once we got ahead of the storm we were back into bright sunshine again but whenever we stopped for too long it would catch us up. During one of these stops we fixed the main tank fuel gauge which has been stuck reading full since the second day of the Simpson Desert crossing. The sender arm keeps sticking for some reason inside the tank. Normally a decent bump in the road will fix it but it’s stayed firmly stuck despite climbing sand dunes, rattling along corrugated roads and driving up creek beds and rock climbs at Eldee. The sender unit is now fully sealed to the top of the tank since the Tom Price fuel leak so I can’t take it out and reposition it. Fortunately removing the inspection plate above the tank (after removing the fridge and all the wolf boxes first) gives access to the top of the sender unit and hitting the top of it repeatedly with the wheel brace got it “unstuck”. Hopefully it’ll stay unstuck now although it’s not a major issue, because we know roughly how many miles we get from a tank, it Is quite annoying.
Tomorrow we’ll head south east to Trangie to visit Jim and Sue before we start heading north into Queensland.