On our third day out in the outback we drove north to Coober Pedy and spent the night in an underground hostel inside an old opal mine. It was pretty sick. We also gave up on eating only pasta with red sauce and made a giant pile of meat, a giant pile of veggies, and a giant pot of rice.
Our drive north was spent doing race team practice: tire changes, control stops, and all of the other little things that we need to be able to do quickly and well. The most exciting one was definitely our practice passing other teams as a convoy.
We decided that simply passing one of our vehicles when we were all on the same channel and aware of each other was not realistic, so we added a twist: one set of cars spoke only English on channel one of our radios, while the other spoke only Spanish on channel two. As chase radio I was responsible for bridging this gap with my incredibly broken high school Spanish. It turns out that reading in Spanish and speaking Spanish are different skills.
The result? "¡HOLA CHILE!" as a salutation, because the best way to communicate is as loudly as possible.
Things turned into even more of a shitshow when a road train pulled up behind us and asked to pass on the CB radio. Suddenly we had three radios talking at once, all in different languages. I hear max has video, and I hope I never have to watch it.
Passing worked in the end, and we repeated the exercise with every driver and in different languages. All of the practice paid off on our mock race, when we passed a car for real with no hiccups at all.
Not many pictures in this post, because it was mostly driving and we've already been through this stretch of road five times. Here's Luminos on the array stand.
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