Day 48 - Melbourne to Portland - 377km

This leg of the journey is split into two sections. The first is from Melbourne to Adelaide with Alicia which will complete my entire lap around Australia. The trip doesn't end there as I have moved across Australia twice since starting the ride. The second section will be from Adelaide to Brisbane (where I'm currently living) with Shea riding the Husky.
Due to the Easter holiday we were limited on available flights and very limited on available hotel rooms. This meant that today Alicia and I had to fly from Brisbane to Melbourne, repair and pack the bikes, and then ride 377 km to the only hotel room I could find in a 200km radius. Our schedule was tight but with luck we could get there with some daylight left.
Luck was not on our side today. I replaced the exhaust, auxiliary fuel tank bracket, license plate and battery on my bike in record time and then had to put the KTM on a trickle charger for two hours due to the battery being dead. It still would not start and then Alicia said "Why don't you just jump start it?" To my embarrassment I found the cables deep in my bag and the bike roared to life in a few second after the jump from Alicia's Husky. She informed me that I wasted two hours for something she fixed in seconds. With this done we were on our way and way behind schedule. We changed our sight seeing route to the most direct route possible and buckled down for the trip. We arrived about 30min after dark and just barely made it to the fuel station with Alicia's bike running on fumes. It seemed much to early for it to run out of fuel but I thought my memory must be bad. As I was filling the bikes Alicia she told me "I must be shaking from the cold because the front of the bike is really wobbly on the highway" I asked her how long it had been going on and she said all day. The front tire was completely flat and had been for a few hundred kilometres which definitely would cause a "wobbly front end" at 100km+ speeds and running out of fuel early. We were both too cold and tired to mess with it then and I figured that if she could handle it all day on the highway she could handle it the 3 additional kilometres to the hotel. Tomorrow should be a lot more relaxed after I change out the tube.