Road works of Southern NSW

We rumbled down the road to Mallacoota again.  The day began by my channeling my inner pelican by being unable to locate my headlamp, which is needed for (inter alia) possum spotting.  After Frances commented that she thought the last time I had used it was at Rutherglen I searched all the luggage we'd taken there and (finally) looked in my computer satchel, which is where I had stored it.

The two most interesting things about the trip were:
  1. the number of times we went through road works and the various activities (or lack thereof) we encountered; and 
  2. the temperature effects at various points.
To deal with road works first.  The first lot we encountered were of course on the Big Dipper, about halfway to Queanbeyan.  After about a year of extreme annoyance due to delays and constant repetition of work, they finally got some bitumen back on the surface today.

 Apparently they had done the lot by noon, just before it started raining.

We filled up with fuel in Queanbeyan and I reset the the trip meter to zero.  So that gave me some measures of distance for various road work events
  1. Old Cooma Rd (12km): 60kph limit for 1 km.  No road work at all, just an entrance to a private work site off the road.
  2. Old Cooma Rd (16.9km) 60km for 0.5km - no signs of any work anywhere.
  3. Monaro Highway (27.1km) Prepare to Stop signs.  No change of limit and no work.  Just left the signs around from filling a pothole a month ago!
  4. Monaro Highway (50.0km, just South of Michelago) Prepare to stop and limit of 60kph.  We were stopped briefly and they were doing work on a turning lane.
  5. Snowy Mountains Highway (156Km)  We were actually stopped by a lollipopper, with a plodmobile (but not Mr Plod) in evidence. (see image below)
  6. Back on Monaro Highway towards Bombala (163 km) and we were down to 60kph for 2 km as there had been some potholes filled in.
  7. Monaro Highway (205kmh) 40kph, prepare to stop, for some work as turned left.  This was unusal as the lollipopper haved us to catch up to a truck so we got through efficently!
  8. Imlay Rd (252km) 60kph for some distance as a couple of piles of gravel had been put beside the road.
  9. Imlay Rd (267km) 40kkph with a lollipopper as they were patching along about 3km of road and a roller was rolling around.

The next image shows the route with a few of the numbers relevant to the above events.

WRT temperatures, it was quite warm (27C) when we set off but soon after leaving Queanbeyan we went through a shower and the temperature dropped to 21C.  That got us to have a game of guessing what the temperature would be at nimmitabel (near point 4 on the map and the highest point on the route).  I went for 20C and Frances decided to go low so chose 18C.  It was actually 22C.

As we dropped to Bombala the temperature gradually rose, 25C.  Getting out the other side and there were strange clouds over ranges   By the time we had gone a further 25km (close to Imlay Road - point 8) it had dropped to 15C and pretty much stayed there until we got to the Coast.  At Mallacoota it was 19C.

Of lesser interest was a qualitative observation that there were many more log trucks on the road than usual.  Quite a bit of the area we drive through is State Forest but we usually only see one of two jinkers.  I think we passed 4 laden ones, beginning soon after Bombala and crossed with a similar number of unladen ones heading West along Imlay Rd. .

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