2013.08.01 — Tracksuit Thursday

Matt adhering strictly to Tracksuit Thursday. At least one other teammate didn’t get the memo.

We set out from camp Kazakh II and lost our bumper driving through a field back to the main road. Queue the duct tape. As of press time, Jon Hay’s bumper remains attached. This day featured a lot of driving and little stopping. The roads were paved the entire way, just as we had hoped. The strap holding Jon Hay’s spares to her roof snapped at the high speeds, so we had to pull over and re-fix them with the broken strap. We hit some pretty crazy storms, which slowed us down a bit.

Storm brewing.

We lost the main road at dusk near the town of Karabutek. Roads just fizzle out sometimes, making it clear that an unintuitive maneuver was required at an earlier juncture. We turned into Karabutek and followed it’s only paved road, which took a chaotic path through town. The streets were filled with people and cattle. The paved road ended at a “T” with a crater-packed dirt road. This was not right. We could see a car in the distance traveling on a road which appeared to run in a northish-southish direction. We took our dirt road North to see if it might intersect, but our road soon became impassable. We headed back to our “T” and noticed a similar phenomenon in the opposite direction. We tried again and this time we found our lost road. We setup camp shortly thereafter and went straight to sleep.

Camp Kazakh III