“Turn around,”yelled the motorcyclist on the rust-red outback trail. We were in the southwest corner of Australia’s Northern Territory, one of the most remote parts of the world’s most deserted continent. He was riding toward us on a big performance dirt bike, the sort you see in the Paris-Dakar desert race, and his leather overalls and Darth Vader helmet were covered in dust. “The sand ahead is terrible,” he said. “You have no hope of getting through. Especially,” he paused, nodding rather dismissively at our car, “in this.” At our Mini. Turning around was unthinkable. Forty-four years after the first east-west crossing through the center of this massive country by car, there’s still no paved road through the middle that connects the east and west coasts. The only paved roads that link the two coasts are far to the north or way to the south. Both involve diversions of well over 1000 miles. There was, for us, no alternative. Why were we driving a Mini when we could have easily chosen a more sensible vehicle? Well, one of the four adventurers on that first-ever east-west crossing of Australia in 1965 was my dad. And he did it in a Mini…. Read full this story
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Mini Across Australia have 295 words, post on www.motortrend.com at November 1, 2009. This is cached page on Goose Art. If you want remove this page, please contact us.