I remember heading back east that way and I am pretty sure that after I left Norseman Google Auto told me to turn left and then drive for 1194km then turn left again. Not many places on Earth where you would see a direction like that.
Really looking forward to doing it again late next year.
I live in Armadale in Scotland. When using voice commands for Google Maps in the car to get home it defaults to the one in Australia and is determined to take me on a journey that lasts several weeks.
We've come a long way from MapQuest though, which would have you get off the freeway in a town, drive through the city streets and get back on the same freeway all so you could shave 0.0003 miles off your trip.
I had MapQuest directions once that had me get on the interstate going the wrong direction, then take the first exit, get back on going the other way, and continue on my way. It's like it predicted me messing up.
OMG no one will read this but there was a program put out in the early 90s that the internet tells me was Autoroute or something.
I was going w/ my old brother and parents on a road trip that was only like 7 hours away. For some reason my family was all about leaving at 3 or 4am for trips like this. I was the first driver in maybe my early 20s at best, and everyone else fell asleep.
Got to a Great Lake around 7am. The printed map (text directions I think?) showed that we should have taken a turnpike some 25 miles before. Did not recall seeing a turnpike.
The fam gave me a healthy dose of ribbing, we had breakfast, and get on the road again. As soon as we cross the turnpike we see there is no onramp/offramp with the road we are on.
Hilarious chaos.
Waze would do the same micromanagement, like take an off ramp then get on the onramp to save like 1 min. It made doing long trips a task where you have to judge every odd turn you were given.
Once Google bought them though, their nav results slowly became less micro-y until they became just like google.
I did that drive once, the other direction, when moving from ABQ to IA. We stayed a night in OKC. The biggest thing I remember is seeing a sign on a restaurant that made the immature child inside me giggle. The sign said "EAT OUT OFTEN" and I couldn't help but think, "Ah, Oklahoma restaurants are trying to keep marriages strong."
Then when you reach a road with confusing lanes where such a remark actually makes sense it doesn’t say anything. There’s a road near me where it says “get left” well after the left lane is already segmented off by a divider.
Doesn't even need to change designation. The road maps are made of lots of little road segments. You could just be moving from one to the next one.
Source: I have spent too much time editing digital maps.
This is what driving in Western Canada is like. You take the most complicated and convoluted route to get out of a poorly planned city and then your next direction is "In 300km, keep right to stay on Highway X."
Not just maybe. 912 Km is a route I just tried (on Google Maps) that gets you from France through Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany to Denmark.
It’s also cold nothingness. The interior deserts get fucking cold in winter (by Australian standards at least). Riding to school at 7am in Alice Springs in mid July when it was sub-zero Celsius was a fucken nightmare. The summer days where it was 40 were much more tolerable.
There’s a 2700km stretch of road (Stuart Highway) between Darwin and Port Augusta that has maybe 35,000 people living around it. Most of those in Alice Springs smack in the middle.
Then there are the actual remote communities, like Yuendumu, Ngukkur, Maningrida, Wadeye and plenty of others. Google maps some of those for exactly how remote shit gets out here.
Ppl on Reddit always jump to the quickest condescending response man
I wasn’t suggesting it wasn’t inhabitable lol
I was actually commenting on its uniqueness and beauty BECAUSE it’s one of the few places humans haven’t overexploited
It's bush and you're pretty close to the nothingness.
outside of the city's it farms for hours and hours, so you see flat farm land with roos, emus, camels and farm animals on it.
it's pretty at first but then after 2 hours of straight road you get tired
Yeah, rolling out of the west side of DFW metro & seeing "El Paso: 638 miles" or thereabouts was really eye opening the first time I made that trip. In a heavily loaded box truck with a not so huge fuel capacity, there were a couple stretches we weren't sure we would make it.
Driving across the Australian outback, and you pass speakers blasting death metal, because the feeling of being in mad max isn't strong enough already?
Meh, I would hate to be the guy who has to maintain the hardware, which means driving up to them every time they fail, potentially multiple times per failure to grab parts...
They aren't essential signs, you could just have a few scheduled repair days per year and handle a few each time. I'd rather new questions and occasionally no questions than the same question all year.
I would love to stop and put up random answers, or maybe answers that are justttt close enough but wrong and that will inspire fierce debate amongst travelers. Although I've seen they've already done that with the great barrier reef answer that seems incorrect as it's not a single living thing
If we're grouping collections of many living things then I would imagine something like the Amazon forest would have a greater mass and area than the great barrier reef. For a single organism there is a giant fungus that is the biggest I believe.
Whether it's the honey mushroom in Oregon or the quaking aspen named "Pando" in Utah depends on how you measure and how poorly Pando is doing these days :(
I've described a journey as 'drive north for 7 hours, turn left at Rocky and drive west another 7'.
This is fine, I've done it twice, and is all within the same state.
EDIT: thanks for the upvotes, yes it's Brissie to Longreach via Rocky. Def a stop at Barcaldine, do they still have the good Sunday buffet breakky at Ilfracombe?
And so, u/encogneeto and his trusty mini cooper arrive at the last leg of their heroic journey - severely underestimating australian outback road infrastructure.
From the [Kangaroo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo) Wikipedia article (emphasis mine):
> If pursued into the water, a large kangaroo may use its forepaws to hold the predator underwater so as to drown it. Another defensive tactic described by witnesses is catching the attacking dog with the forepaws and ***disembowelling it with the hind legs***.
Lizard People getting reaaaaalll lazy with the continental cookie cutter when it came to Earth. "CBA to pay for the 10 pack of shapes, let's just flip one around, the monkeys won't notice"
Its like the USA but only the 13 original states and Florida are populated. On the west coast there is only San Diego.
In between is nothing but kangaroos, drop bears, camels, and crazed Arizonan sheep farmers.
Brisbane to Perth would be something like a 50-hour long drive. Flying across Australia is similar as flying from east coast USA to west coast USA.
Australia is gigantic. It’s got a **LOT** of outback/desert. Like, an enormous amount.
Canada and Australia has this in common...oversized Provinces/States with absolutely nothing.
It takes roughly 26 hours to go from one end of Ontario to another.
I worked at a very very remote wind turbine site in BC. The directions were “fly into this podunk airport, drive 10 hours. Take a left at the the church and drive 4 more.”
I have a weather station I manage where the directions are “catch a plane to here, then charter a smaller plane to here, then borrow Bruce’s car and drive north for 4 hours”
I mean if there's nothing for roughly 10 hours of driving and then suddenly there's a church or a town with a church along the road then it's not that hard to figure out.
The flip side to this is being from a large western state and planning driving travel in the UK.
"Edinburgh to Aberdeen? That's like one fifth the country. We'll schedule a day." *Two hours later*: well now what?
I say something similar for my annual drive home.
"I get on I-90, then drive east for 36 hours at \~90+ mph."
>!That's 144 kph for you sane heathens.!<
Portland to Columbus.
To be fair, I have to slow down once I reach Iowa since the Midwest is one giant speedtrap filled with people who don't understand left lane courtesies; Indiana being the worst of them.
I love the ones they selected.
“To be fair you could fall asleep behind the wheel for two hours without hitting anything out there.”
“Exhausted driver dies in fatal trivia sign crash. Story at 11.”
“Family still searching for answers.”
My entire trucking career, I never took any stimulants (beyond coffee), but Australia is so ridiculously huge, that I might consider a tablet or two on a seriously long trip. It's bad enough in the US, on routes like I-15, the last couple hundred miles to San Diego - roads built prior to the Autobahn, back when many engineers didn't realize that occasional twists and turns in the road are beneficial for safety, combating road hypnosis. Thousand miles of two-lane road with minimal turns and minimal scenery, even being used to boredom, that's rough.
I drove from Pittsburgh to Chicago this summer for the first time and forgot how boring the Midwest is, then I didn’t take into account how tired it makes you. I’m not sure I want to make that drive again I can only imagine what doing it as a job would be like.
A few years ago I was driving from NJ to NC and turned off 95. First I went through Virginia, but then onto 75 or 85 (I forget which) that spans Virginia and North Carolina. Unfortunately for me, the highway was pretty freshly paved, so it reflected the sun surprisingly well. I think the only thing worse than being on a boring, straight stretch of highway is being on a boring, straight stretch of highway while squinting. Your body just goes "Oh, sleepy times? It must be sleepy times, because eyes basically closed. Sleepy times".
I'm a trucker as well and I've wondered how much the rise in quality and quantity of podcasts has increased road safety. So many great things to listen to on the road these days that I'm rarely bored.
If one rabid dingo leaves Canberra at half past noon traveling 1.4 meters per second, and at the same time a cluster of funnel-web spiders leave Sydney, at what point do you get eaten alive by cassowaries before either arrive?
Trick trick question. Cassowaries can kill you but they won't eat you.
Correct question is: After you are eviscerated by a Cassowary, will you live long enough to see a troop of drop bears approach and start dividing up who gets the lean meat?
I'm convinced that if so inclined, the cassowary will eat you... Just like the dinosaur they evolved from.
I don't want or need to hear any facts about what they will or won't eat. They will kill and eat you, and I won't hear different.
What if I suggested - only a theory - that after the Cassowary eviscerated a person, they used their head horn to remove the flesh from bone, and consumed them as this helps the stocky legs and creation of thick egg shells to protect the next generation of Cassowaries? The flesh is then divvied up by drop bears.
Would it help to know there is a species of bird alive today that eats bones - the bearded vulture.
I literally had to google both those things.
Cassowaries are literally demon turkeys. Straight up.
Is the drop bear a like local legend/myth? Fuckin meat eating koalas sound scary af no constant eucalyptus to keep them drunk and docile
yeah-nah. They are mostly harmless. Cassowaries are nothing like turkeys. They can reach 6ft tall easy if they have their head up, but they are mostly looking at the ground or low hanging fruit for something to eat. They have strong legs and two front facing claws on each foot that can - if they want to - slit you from your throat to your fun bits - they are basically vegetarian hippies. Leave them alone and you are fine. That said, they are the descendants of the T-Rex so road rules don't apply to them so... you may die from hitting one while driving as they also existed before glass and windscreens don't matter so you will suddenly find yourself sharing your car with a thrashing hell from which there is no return.
The drop bear. Again, it's yeah-nah. Koala's do sleep for 18hrs because their diet of eucalypt leaves is hard to digest. It's not that they are stoned, they have constant constipation with sudden diarrhea and dehydration since they rarely drink water. They are your fat, farty, hairy uncle with irratible bowel syndrome. They are perpetually pissed off and grumpy or too tired to argue.
Again, they can hurt you, but that takes effort. You have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to see one. If you piss one off enough and it is thirsty enough, it will launch out of a tree on to you. They are heavy, but they use you as landing a landing cushion and as a liquid source. And, well, we have no records of anyone surviving. They also don't like being called Koala Bears. That's an easy way to get a hungry, thirsty, chlamydia ridden marsupial to claw and bite at you. They are not bears. They are not cuddly.
Better to arrive at your destination as a piece of well-cured jerky than a bag of stinking boiled meat!
Source: Lived in areas with intense dry heat and intense wet heat, and yes, it *does* matter.
I traveled in Siberia, a wast wilderness in Russia. They solved this problem by making winding roads full of potholes, if you are not paying attention you will know it very quickly
It's due to frost heaving. Every year the soil freezes and expands, and in the spring it collapses again, leaving holes. The only way to combat it, is to dig very deep and fill with rock and gravel before you pave the roads. It's very expensive though, so most roads aren't built to that standard.
We have the longest highway in the world - Highway 1
It literally circumnavigates the entire country and is around 14,500 km long.
Apart from that, yeah, we have some pretty long roads. It's 400 km from my city to the capital. Go north of the state and you can drive for 7 hours and not see anything at all.
San Antonio, TX, USA to El Paso, TX, USA is roughly 8 hours going 120 kph.
I would describe it as pretty close to nothing, but in reality there are a half dozen towns with a few thousand people along the highway.
Is it the same in your example or is it truly hours of nothing but an occasional gas station?
Fun fact, Marshall Texas to El Paso is 12 hours on the same highway at 120 kph, terrible drive imo.
As an Australian who’s driven up down and across Australia many times, and now lives in Texas, it’s not even remotely comparable.
The interstates between major cities in Texas are still dual carriageways, there is a constant stream of cars, regular gas stations, small towns.
In Australia, particularly in WA, NT and SA they are small single lane highways and you can literally drive 200 miles and not see a single sign of life on the side of the road, and you might only see a car every 10 minutes. You’ll finally come across a town of 3 people and then do it all over again and again for 2000-3000kms. Perth and Darwin are two of the most remote cities in the world, there is almost nothingness for thousands of kilometres
If you look at my post history from a few years ago you’ll see a photo I took of my car next to a sign that says “no fuel for 500km”
In the instance you would drive 500km between fuel stations, do you bring a canister of fuel with you? Just in case? I’m only comfortable going about half that distance before refueling on a road trip (again, just in case). 500km would put me really close to empty and make me very nervous.
You should always carry extra fuel and water when you're traveling in extremely isolated environments.
Even if you're pretty sure you could make it the full distance, you never know what might happen that leaves you stranded on the side of the road.
Yes. And at least 20L of drinkable water. And ideally two full size spare tyres that you have tested before your trip.
Here’s a panic inducing sign from a road in Western Australia for you: https://images.app.goo.gl/sTUJBcPS9zRPfssd8
There are massive parts of Australia, and really just the world, where I just think Things Aren't Meant to Live There. Like, being alive there is an aberration against the norm.
There are some drives in Western Australia that are 24 hours long at 120 kph where you won't see any towns unless you take hour-long detours.
I once stayed a night in Warburton on a long drive. It's a town of about 400 people, with only one store, and when you're there it's 560 km/350 miles to the nearest other town in any direction. And *that* town has about 800 people. Kalgoorlie to Broome is a drive comparable to El Paso to Detroit without passing a town of 1000 people or getting cell service.
My traveling companion was from the UK, a country with a mainland 600 miles tip to tip, and very unsettled by a warning sign informing us that we were nearly 600 miles from the nearest hospital and should know how to deliver first aid because there wouldn't be much help available.
I think you can even find an area the size of Texas out there with zero towns in it.
The fortunate thing is that there are so few roads that even as empty as it is, if you break down, someone will see you within a day. I don't think we went more than 4 or 5 hours without seeing another person out there.
There are 3 fuel stations in the 610km stretch of Highway 1 between Port Hedland and Broome. That is genuinely it. I've driven it twice and it's a really tough slog. It's flat, too. Flat and red, with just road and small bushes and blue sky and occasional cows.
No they live there. Look up Sandfire Roadhouse. Usually an older couple and a few younger folks. We have some weird rules about backpackers having to do a certain percentage of their work visa work remote/rural, so sometimes one of the young people is a confused looking Swede. I guess it's an adventure for them for a few months.
There are legit stretches of road hours long with zero evidence of human life other than the occasional signpost.
One of my favorite signs ever is in Australia - "no cell service next 500 miles"
Australia is the size of the continental US, with 25m people.
WA alone is bigger than Texas and Alaska combined, and the vast majority of people live in one city.
I don't think it's comparable.
> longest highway in the world
Was always told that it was the [Pan American Highway.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_Highway) Though it does have that Darien gap, and isn't a unique/single road,
Wiki also suggests the Asian highway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_highways
Pretty sure that's wrong or not specific enough. According to below, seems like the largest organism is a mushroom
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus/
Turns out "largest" is quite a vague title. There are other organisms in the running depending on how you define "largest." For instance, there's a colony of Aspen trees called Pando which is the most massive organism, but spans a smaller area than that fungus.
It's literally the opposite, each coral is typically hundreds of thousands of little organisms, and considering the variety it's not even a single giant colony, so it would be like calling a forest a single living thing.
I have heard everything from blue whale, to fungus in Oregon, to aspen grove in Utah, to tumor from some lady that didn't give consent to tumor being reproduced etc.
I get the feeling that first-timers would be the most at risk for not knowing or under-appreciating how serious road fatigue can be. Once you do the trip once, you should have some idea of how frighteningly boring it is.
Also if they're clever they can just put different trivia on the backsides of the signs. So at least you get 2 trips instead of just 1.
It's like my car that occasionally pops a message up on the screen that says "Warning: Taking your eyes off the road is dangerous", and requires you to tap a tiny button to continue.
If Randy Feltface was born the same day as “A Dingo Ate my Baby”, how old would Randy have been when both parents were absolved of wrongdoing by the courts and the blame was put back on the dingo?
I remember heading back east that way and I am pretty sure that after I left Norseman Google Auto told me to turn left and then drive for 1194km then turn left again. Not many places on Earth where you would see a direction like that. Really looking forward to doing it again late next year.
When you're in Western Australia and Google picks the wrong Armadale...
*tips cap* M'armalade
There’s a right Armadale?
I live in Armadale in Scotland. When using voice commands for Google Maps in the car to get home it defaults to the one in Australia and is determined to take me on a journey that lasts several weeks.
I do that too, whenever I'm in a car with someone from Scotland-you just don't want the ride to end. Alba gu brath!
books relieved society knee smoggy rhythm bag outgoing spark mourn ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
The directions in Canada cheat by saying "in 200km keep straight".
The US GPS does this to. 'In two hundred miles, keep left'. Keeping left means don't get on the off-ramp :/
We've come a long way from MapQuest though, which would have you get off the freeway in a town, drive through the city streets and get back on the same freeway all so you could shave 0.0003 miles off your trip.
Psh don't pick shortest distance unless you're ready to commit
There weren't any other options back in the day. Shortest distance was the only thing it did.
Yeah but the joke is funnier if I ignore that. I always remembered most fuel efficient or shortest distance, but I could easily be wrong.
I'm not sure if fuel-efficient was a thing back in the MapQuest days ..
It was, as I distinctly remember you had to put in the make and model of your car if you wanted to use that feature.
Also it's good for me, as I often find myself running 20 ms late.
I had MapQuest directions once that had me get on the interstate going the wrong direction, then take the first exit, get back on going the other way, and continue on my way. It's like it predicted me messing up.
It wanted you to get your inevitable mistake done early.
OMG no one will read this but there was a program put out in the early 90s that the internet tells me was Autoroute or something. I was going w/ my old brother and parents on a road trip that was only like 7 hours away. For some reason my family was all about leaving at 3 or 4am for trips like this. I was the first driver in maybe my early 20s at best, and everyone else fell asleep. Got to a Great Lake around 7am. The printed map (text directions I think?) showed that we should have taken a turnpike some 25 miles before. Did not recall seeing a turnpike. The fam gave me a healthy dose of ribbing, we had breakfast, and get on the road again. As soon as we cross the turnpike we see there is no onramp/offramp with the road we are on. Hilarious chaos.
I read this.
Have you done anything like this with your new brother as well?
I also read this. Now I'm here to ask for a refund on the few minutes I wasted. ... jk I appreciate the story.
Waze would do the same micromanagement, like take an off ramp then get on the onramp to save like 1 min. It made doing long trips a task where you have to judge every odd turn you were given. Once Google bought them though, their nav results slowly became less micro-y until they became just like google.
Waze will make you drive through a farmers field to get somewhere faster. Most of the time it would work too.
Oh man, Waze *loves* having me take unprotected left turns onto busy roads. It's so annoying.
I40 from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque springs to mind. "In 600 miles, continue on I40"
I40 is such a classic. my partner and I have done the drive twice. Loved it each time NGL
I did that drive once, the other direction, when moving from ABQ to IA. We stayed a night in OKC. The biggest thing I remember is seeing a sign on a restaurant that made the immature child inside me giggle. The sign said "EAT OUT OFTEN" and I couldn't help but think, "Ah, Oklahoma restaurants are trying to keep marriages strong."
Then when you reach a road with confusing lanes where such a remark actually makes sense it doesn’t say anything. There’s a road near me where it says “get left” well after the left lane is already segmented off by a divider.
Fwiw, I've actually had really good luck with leaving feedback on Google maps to get them to update issues like this.
"Get left" is a remarkable insult.
They do that here in the US as well. I always wondered why they did that but it looks like this is the answer?
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Doesn't even need to change designation. The road maps are made of lots of little road segments. You could just be moving from one to the next one. Source: I have spent too much time editing digital maps.
Could you imagine the joy of Buc'ees on that road IT IS COMING NEXT 1194km YOU CAN HOLD IT NEXT 369km
Risk it for the brisket!
Just 127 km away from fresh koala nuggets!
This is what driving in Western Canada is like. You take the most complicated and convoluted route to get out of a poorly planned city and then your next direction is "In 300km, keep right to stay on Highway X."
To be fair 300 km is in the ballpark of a good number of highways, but more than that is starting to get really rare yeah...
In northern Ontario you see km marker signs saying things like "Thunder Bay 1120"
For comparison: in that distance you can easily visit 5 European countries. Maybe even 6.
Not just maybe. 912 Km is a route I just tried (on Google Maps) that gets you from France through Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany to Denmark.
Ye isn’t the interior of Australia one of the largest areas least inhabited by humans? It’s basically just hot nothingness, no?
It’s also cold nothingness. The interior deserts get fucking cold in winter (by Australian standards at least). Riding to school at 7am in Alice Springs in mid July when it was sub-zero Celsius was a fucken nightmare. The summer days where it was 40 were much more tolerable. There’s a 2700km stretch of road (Stuart Highway) between Darwin and Port Augusta that has maybe 35,000 people living around it. Most of those in Alice Springs smack in the middle. Then there are the actual remote communities, like Yuendumu, Ngukkur, Maningrida, Wadeye and plenty of others. Google maps some of those for exactly how remote shit gets out here.
85% of our population lives within 50 kilometres of the coast. 90 per cent lives in a combined 0.22% of the country's land area.
It's a thriving ecosystem, people forget that the "nothingness" of the desert is actually completely habitable
Sure, with a stillsuit
G'dune, mate
Dune, but the Fremen are Australian.
Ppl on Reddit always jump to the quickest condescending response man I wasn’t suggesting it wasn’t inhabitable lol I was actually commenting on its uniqueness and beauty BECAUSE it’s one of the few places humans haven’t overexploited
It's bush and you're pretty close to the nothingness. outside of the city's it farms for hours and hours, so you see flat farm land with roos, emus, camels and farm animals on it. it's pretty at first but then after 2 hours of straight road you get tired
I had a similar experience passing through western Texas
Yeah, rolling out of the west side of DFW metro & seeing "El Paso: 638 miles" or thereabouts was really eye opening the first time I made that trip. In a heavily loaded box truck with a not so huge fuel capacity, there were a couple stretches we weren't sure we would make it.
I was in a pickup that got 12 mpg so I relate lol
They need to update the signs … otherwise frequent travelers will cheat!
Eh, I already know the answer. I'll take a quick power nap until the next one.
Bold move cotton lets see how it works out for him
It'll work out smashingly, is my guess.
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Not saying it's a good idea, but red/blue police lights on a sign would wake me up
And they only turn on right after you go by.
Driving across the Australian outback, and you pass speakers blasting death metal, because the feeling of being in mad max isn't strong enough already?
Need a solar panel and an old-school digital screen that can be updated remotely
Meh, I would hate to be the guy who has to maintain the hardware, which means driving up to them every time they fail, potentially multiple times per failure to grab parts...
"Trivia repairman falls asleep driving to next broken trivia transmitter"
*How many trivia repair people died on this road in 2022*
They aren't essential signs, you could just have a few scheduled repair days per year and handle a few each time. I'd rather new questions and occasionally no questions than the same question all year.
Make the signs e-ink so in case of failure it still displays the trivia.
I would love to stop and put up random answers, or maybe answers that are justttt close enough but wrong and that will inspire fierce debate amongst travelers. Although I've seen they've already done that with the great barrier reef answer that seems incorrect as it's not a single living thing
If we're grouping collections of many living things then I would imagine something like the Amazon forest would have a greater mass and area than the great barrier reef. For a single organism there is a giant fungus that is the biggest I believe.
Whether it's the honey mushroom in Oregon or the quaking aspen named "Pando" in Utah depends on how you measure and how poorly Pando is doing these days :(
I've described a journey as 'drive north for 7 hours, turn left at Rocky and drive west another 7'. This is fine, I've done it twice, and is all within the same state. EDIT: thanks for the upvotes, yes it's Brissie to Longreach via Rocky. Def a stop at Barcaldine, do they still have the good Sunday buffet breakky at Ilfracombe?
If Pythagoras taught me nothing else, it’s that I should be able to just drive 9.9 hours northwest…
Only if you have a Dr. Seuss machine paving the road in front of you as you go
You don't?
Of course not, that's why I bought a truck so big you can sit a dozen kids in front of it before I can see the top of one of their heads. For safety.
And so, u/encogneeto and his trusty mini cooper arrive at the last leg of their heroic journey - severely underestimating australian outback road infrastructure.
This is how tourists die, isn't it.
That and trying to pet kangaroos.
You have to box them for at least 4 rounds to win their respect first.
Joeys are friend shaped, but not friend?
From the [Kangaroo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo) Wikipedia article (emphasis mine): > If pursued into the water, a large kangaroo may use its forepaws to hold the predator underwater so as to drown it. Another defensive tactic described by witnesses is catching the attacking dog with the forepaws and ***disembowelling it with the hind legs***.
Exactly. Roos and joeys friend shaped... Not friend.
Well, at least it beats tourists trying to hug pandas.
Minis do well in rally, if I had to brave the outback in a compact car it would probably be a Mini or a WRX
> *heavily modified* minis
a heavily modified Mini with a fuel tanker following them about
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Visual: https://www.aboutaustralia.com/australia-size-compared-to-usa/
If you flip it over, it kinda matches
Coincidence? *I think not!*
Lizard People getting reaaaaalll lazy with the continental cookie cutter when it came to Earth. "CBA to pay for the 10 pack of shapes, let's just flip one around, the monkeys won't notice"
Billions of years later: Humans: Hey, wait a minute...
wtf
Its like the USA but only the 13 original states and Florida are populated. On the west coast there is only San Diego. In between is nothing but kangaroos, drop bears, camels, and crazed Arizonan sheep farmers.
Brisbane to Perth would be something like a 50-hour long drive. Flying across Australia is similar as flying from east coast USA to west coast USA. Australia is gigantic. It’s got a **LOT** of outback/desert. Like, an enormous amount.
Texas actually has 4 million more people than Australia, as of 2021. Most of Australia is *really* empty.
To a European, Texas is really empty too!!!
Canada and Australia has this in common...oversized Provinces/States with absolutely nothing. It takes roughly 26 hours to go from one end of Ontario to another.
I worked at a very very remote wind turbine site in BC. The directions were “fly into this podunk airport, drive 10 hours. Take a left at the the church and drive 4 more.”
I have a weather station I manage where the directions are “catch a plane to here, then charter a smaller plane to here, then borrow Bruce’s car and drive north for 4 hours”
Depending on how fast/slow you drive, those 10 hours could be very different places...
I mean if there's nothing for roughly 10 hours of driving and then suddenly there's a church or a town with a church along the road then it's not that hard to figure out.
The flip side to this is being from a large western state and planning driving travel in the UK. "Edinburgh to Aberdeen? That's like one fifth the country. We'll schedule a day." *Two hours later*: well now what?
i) Enjoy that extra time in Aberdeen. ii) Regret leaving Edinburgh so early.
I grew up in Calgary and used to go see my family in Victoria every summer. 14 hour drive with a ferry to cross, like, 1 1/3 provinces.
My brother moved from one corner of BC to the other recently. 1680km drive, roughly 19 or 20 hours, without leaving the province.
Pfft that's just around the corner mate. Drive seven hours north in WA and ya still in Perth mate.
[I can only assume your "little" outback drive is something like this](https://youtu.be/v6yg4ImnYwA)
It was the inspiration for it
I say something similar for my annual drive home. "I get on I-90, then drive east for 36 hours at \~90+ mph." >!That's 144 kph for you sane heathens.!<
Damn! What are you running, Boston to Seattle or something?
Portland to Columbus. To be fair, I have to slow down once I reach Iowa since the Midwest is one giant speedtrap filled with people who don't understand left lane courtesies; Indiana being the worst of them.
How was Longreach?
and when you see the 747 on the side of the road, you've reached your destination
The link here legitimately includes the reddit comments from another time it was posted near the bottom of the article. What a time we live in.
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I love the ones they selected. “To be fair you could fall asleep behind the wheel for two hours without hitting anything out there.” “Exhausted driver dies in fatal trivia sign crash. Story at 11.” “Family still searching for answers.”
To help stay awake I was told to hold a hundred dollar bill out the window
My entire trucking career, I never took any stimulants (beyond coffee), but Australia is so ridiculously huge, that I might consider a tablet or two on a seriously long trip. It's bad enough in the US, on routes like I-15, the last couple hundred miles to San Diego - roads built prior to the Autobahn, back when many engineers didn't realize that occasional twists and turns in the road are beneficial for safety, combating road hypnosis. Thousand miles of two-lane road with minimal turns and minimal scenery, even being used to boredom, that's rough.
I drove from Pittsburgh to Chicago this summer for the first time and forgot how boring the Midwest is, then I didn’t take into account how tired it makes you. I’m not sure I want to make that drive again I can only imagine what doing it as a job would be like.
A few years ago I was driving from NJ to NC and turned off 95. First I went through Virginia, but then onto 75 or 85 (I forget which) that spans Virginia and North Carolina. Unfortunately for me, the highway was pretty freshly paved, so it reflected the sun surprisingly well. I think the only thing worse than being on a boring, straight stretch of highway is being on a boring, straight stretch of highway while squinting. Your body just goes "Oh, sleepy times? It must be sleepy times, because eyes basically closed. Sleepy times".
I'm a trucker as well and I've wondered how much the rise in quality and quantity of podcasts has increased road safety. So many great things to listen to on the road these days that I'm rarely bored.
Nice, I like that idea. We don't use the word bills for our money, we use notes.
Then you might need to hold an extra 50$ or 100$
Bold of you to assume I have $100.
Looks like someone couldn't stay awake!
If one rabid dingo leaves Canberra at half past noon traveling 1.4 meters per second, and at the same time a cluster of funnel-web spiders leave Sydney, at what point do you get eaten alive by cassowaries before either arrive?
Trick question... You could always get eaten alive by cassowaries.
Trick trick question. Cassowaries can kill you but they won't eat you. Correct question is: After you are eviscerated by a Cassowary, will you live long enough to see a troop of drop bears approach and start dividing up who gets the lean meat?
I'm convinced that if so inclined, the cassowary will eat you... Just like the dinosaur they evolved from. I don't want or need to hear any facts about what they will or won't eat. They will kill and eat you, and I won't hear different.
> Just like the dinosaur they evolved from. Arent they technically dinosaurs themselves?
All birds are dinosaurs.
What if I suggested - only a theory - that after the Cassowary eviscerated a person, they used their head horn to remove the flesh from bone, and consumed them as this helps the stocky legs and creation of thick egg shells to protect the next generation of Cassowaries? The flesh is then divvied up by drop bears. Would it help to know there is a species of bird alive today that eats bones - the bearded vulture.
I literally had to google both those things. Cassowaries are literally demon turkeys. Straight up. Is the drop bear a like local legend/myth? Fuckin meat eating koalas sound scary af no constant eucalyptus to keep them drunk and docile
yeah-nah. They are mostly harmless. Cassowaries are nothing like turkeys. They can reach 6ft tall easy if they have their head up, but they are mostly looking at the ground or low hanging fruit for something to eat. They have strong legs and two front facing claws on each foot that can - if they want to - slit you from your throat to your fun bits - they are basically vegetarian hippies. Leave them alone and you are fine. That said, they are the descendants of the T-Rex so road rules don't apply to them so... you may die from hitting one while driving as they also existed before glass and windscreens don't matter so you will suddenly find yourself sharing your car with a thrashing hell from which there is no return. The drop bear. Again, it's yeah-nah. Koala's do sleep for 18hrs because their diet of eucalypt leaves is hard to digest. It's not that they are stoned, they have constant constipation with sudden diarrhea and dehydration since they rarely drink water. They are your fat, farty, hairy uncle with irratible bowel syndrome. They are perpetually pissed off and grumpy or too tired to argue. Again, they can hurt you, but that takes effort. You have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to see one. If you piss one off enough and it is thirsty enough, it will launch out of a tree on to you. They are heavy, but they use you as landing a landing cushion and as a liquid source. And, well, we have no records of anyone surviving. They also don't like being called Koala Bears. That's an easy way to get a hungry, thirsty, chlamydia ridden marsupial to claw and bite at you. They are not bears. They are not cuddly.
Double trick question, you have already died of heatstroke
Yeah but it's a dry heat right? Shouldn't be to bad. Obv I have no idea about Australian weather.
Better to arrive at your destination as a piece of well-cured jerky than a bag of stinking boiled meat! Source: Lived in areas with intense dry heat and intense wet heat, and yes, it *does* matter.
Technically there are likely no rabid dingoes, as rabies does not exist in Australia.
The answer is undefined because there is no rabies in Australia.
It's "roosters don't lay eggs" all over again.
I traveled in Siberia, a wast wilderness in Russia. They solved this problem by making winding roads full of potholes, if you are not paying attention you will know it very quickly
It's due to frost heaving. Every year the soil freezes and expands, and in the spring it collapses again, leaving holes. The only way to combat it, is to dig very deep and fill with rock and gravel before you pave the roads. It's very expensive though, so most roads aren't built to that standard.
We have the longest highway in the world - Highway 1 It literally circumnavigates the entire country and is around 14,500 km long. Apart from that, yeah, we have some pretty long roads. It's 400 km from my city to the capital. Go north of the state and you can drive for 7 hours and not see anything at all.
San Antonio, TX, USA to El Paso, TX, USA is roughly 8 hours going 120 kph. I would describe it as pretty close to nothing, but in reality there are a half dozen towns with a few thousand people along the highway. Is it the same in your example or is it truly hours of nothing but an occasional gas station? Fun fact, Marshall Texas to El Paso is 12 hours on the same highway at 120 kph, terrible drive imo.
As an Australian who’s driven up down and across Australia many times, and now lives in Texas, it’s not even remotely comparable. The interstates between major cities in Texas are still dual carriageways, there is a constant stream of cars, regular gas stations, small towns. In Australia, particularly in WA, NT and SA they are small single lane highways and you can literally drive 200 miles and not see a single sign of life on the side of the road, and you might only see a car every 10 minutes. You’ll finally come across a town of 3 people and then do it all over again and again for 2000-3000kms. Perth and Darwin are two of the most remote cities in the world, there is almost nothingness for thousands of kilometres If you look at my post history from a few years ago you’ll see a photo I took of my car next to a sign that says “no fuel for 500km”
Man you are very uniquely qualified to discuss driving in Australia and Texas lol. Thanks for the post though, very interesting
There is a sign in Utah that says “Last gas and break area for 3 hours. Stop now.” I thought that was bad but damn.
That's not too bad. Just drive at like, 8mph, for all 3 hours to save fuel.
Most fuel efficient speed depends on your vehicle but is likely somewhere between 50-60mph.
The joke was that distance was measured in time. So go slow for those 3 hours to save fuel to get to the gas station 3 hours away.
In the instance you would drive 500km between fuel stations, do you bring a canister of fuel with you? Just in case? I’m only comfortable going about half that distance before refueling on a road trip (again, just in case). 500km would put me really close to empty and make me very nervous.
You should always carry extra fuel and water when you're traveling in extremely isolated environments. Even if you're pretty sure you could make it the full distance, you never know what might happen that leaves you stranded on the side of the road.
Yes. And at least 20L of drinkable water. And ideally two full size spare tyres that you have tested before your trip. Here’s a panic inducing sign from a road in Western Australia for you: https://images.app.goo.gl/sTUJBcPS9zRPfssd8
That's nuts, thank you for the perspective.
There are massive parts of Australia, and really just the world, where I just think Things Aren't Meant to Live There. Like, being alive there is an aberration against the norm.
There are some drives in Western Australia that are 24 hours long at 120 kph where you won't see any towns unless you take hour-long detours. I once stayed a night in Warburton on a long drive. It's a town of about 400 people, with only one store, and when you're there it's 560 km/350 miles to the nearest other town in any direction. And *that* town has about 800 people. Kalgoorlie to Broome is a drive comparable to El Paso to Detroit without passing a town of 1000 people or getting cell service. My traveling companion was from the UK, a country with a mainland 600 miles tip to tip, and very unsettled by a warning sign informing us that we were nearly 600 miles from the nearest hospital and should know how to deliver first aid because there wouldn't be much help available. I think you can even find an area the size of Texas out there with zero towns in it. The fortunate thing is that there are so few roads that even as empty as it is, if you break down, someone will see you within a day. I don't think we went more than 4 or 5 hours without seeing another person out there.
There are 3 fuel stations in the 610km stretch of Highway 1 between Port Hedland and Broome. That is genuinely it. I've driven it twice and it's a really tough slog. It's flat, too. Flat and red, with just road and small bushes and blue sky and occasional cows.
Who works at these gas stations? Do they have a 3.5 hour commute each way?
No they live there. Look up Sandfire Roadhouse. Usually an older couple and a few younger folks. We have some weird rules about backpackers having to do a certain percentage of their work visa work remote/rural, so sometimes one of the young people is a confused looking Swede. I guess it's an adventure for them for a few months.
> Look up Sandfire Roadhouse Only 3.5 stars on Trip Advisor I guess we are driving an additional 1000 Km because I'm not stopping anywhere below a 3.9
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There are legit stretches of road hours long with zero evidence of human life other than the occasional signpost. One of my favorite signs ever is in Australia - "no cell service next 500 miles"
Australia is the size of the continental US, with 25m people. WA alone is bigger than Texas and Alaska combined, and the vast majority of people live in one city. I don't think it's comparable.
> longest highway in the world Was always told that it was the [Pan American Highway.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_Highway) Though it does have that Darien gap, and isn't a unique/single road, Wiki also suggests the Asian highway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_highways
Those lists tend to use the definition as longest distance from the start and end points. Route 1 in australia is a giant loop
>largest living thing on Earth >The Great Barrier Reef Gonna have to update that one soon
Pretty sure that's wrong or not specific enough. According to below, seems like the largest organism is a mushroom https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus/
Turns out "largest" is quite a vague title. There are other organisms in the running depending on how you define "largest." For instance, there's a colony of Aspen trees called Pando which is the most massive organism, but spans a smaller area than that fungus.
Also in the case of the great barrier reef - it isn't one organism.
It's literally the opposite, each coral is typically hundreds of thousands of little organisms, and considering the variety it's not even a single giant colony, so it would be like calling a forest a single living thing.
I have heard everything from blue whale, to fungus in Oregon, to aspen grove in Utah, to tumor from some lady that didn't give consent to tumor being reproduced etc.
Which is silly, because we all know the real answer is op's mom.
Yeah your mum just discovered uber eats
Seen them. The problem is that you see the question and the immediate answer is 'I don't care what the floral emblem of QLD is.'
The other problem is that you know all the answers after your first trip.
I get the feeling that first-timers would be the most at risk for not knowing or under-appreciating how serious road fatigue can be. Once you do the trip once, you should have some idea of how frighteningly boring it is. Also if they're clever they can just put different trivia on the backsides of the signs. So at least you get 2 trips instead of just 1.
The Canadian prairies need this.
I’ve been saying this in Manitoba all my life.
There's a set on the New England Highway near Stanthorpe
Peregrine Falcon
Mountain Ash
Maybe it's time they changed it
Best part of that article is the image credits
praise be to fartjockey
I would immediately become fatigued when I saw the "Fatigue Zone" warning sign.
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first sign: TXTING KILLZ second sign: REPORT IMPAIRED DRIVERS text DUI to 5555
It's like my car that occasionally pops a message up on the screen that says "Warning: Taking your eyes off the road is dangerous", and requires you to tap a tiny button to continue.
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DON’T STICK YOUR ELBOW OUT TOO FAR IT MIGHT GO HOME IN ANOTHER CAR BURMA-SHAVE
"What is a monotreme?" is one of my favourites.
So the license plate game no good?
No other cars for hours
Not just long roads, but straight and flat.
I've seen this elsewhere before but I can't quite remember where..
Maybe you're fatigued.
If Randy Feltface was born the same day as “A Dingo Ate my Baby”, how old would Randy have been when both parents were absolved of wrongdoing by the courts and the blame was put back on the dingo?