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Reading the signs is important

Murchison Road

It ain’t Winter here yet, but some people seem to not realise that. This “Drive Scribbley When Frosty” sign has been neatly hit so that it’s spun to a right-angle.

Not only that, it’s on a straightish bit of Murchison Road, a 5km bitumen road leading up to the Murchison Dam, not out in the middle of a wiggly highway somewhere.

One of the handy driving tips I was given by Ronn, manager of the Tullah Tavern, was “Don’t pull over.” Change flat tyres in the middle of the road, that kind of thing.

The ice tends to slide off to the sides of the road, and get slushed there by cars driving past, so when you pull over, you tend to keep right on pulling over, and your car sits there until Spring. I’ve seen photos of cranes, vehicle-moving flatbeds and all sorts of heavy, stable, won’t-happen-to-me vehicles sitting sideways (or upside down!) on the side of the road because of this.

Suddenly, the unending lengths of Armco we have lining the roads around here makes sense. (-:

I also found a symptom that not all of the slate on Murchison Road fell off the sides by itself. The broken handle of a good-sized gympie lay prone in the rock-pile.

There’s also a symptom that Winter repairs might not be all that straightforward, in 60 or so metres of multi-core ’phone cable lying tangled in the rocks downhill of the road. I’m guessing that it was much easier to string new cable than to untangle the old.

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