DAY 1
Week 1
ALICE SPRINGS (Northern Territory, AUS) to DARWIN (Northern Territory, AUS)
Thursday September 27th, 1990
TODAYS MILEAGE – 933 miles or 1501 kilometres
TRIP MILEAGE – 933 miles or 1501 kilometres
... and away we go ... weeee!!! 
First part of the footy trip was to actually get to Darwin for the flight to Denpasar.
As most of the fellas had left the previous day on the Greyhound bus, the day started out at sparrows fart with one of my best mates Trevor "Fluxy" Flux, our Westies team mate Donovan "Hippy" Carter and myself all piling into my 1988 'VN' Holden Commodore and pointing it in a northerly direction.
I took the first shift behind the steering wheel and just before dawn I heard Hippy stir from his sleep on the back seat. He was about to fire up a durry when he looks over my shoulder and asks what speed we're doing - about a dollar forty I tell him. "Fuck that" was his response and he simply laid back down and pulled his blanket over his head - not sure what that was about.
We got to the Threeways Roadhouse and Fluxy slipped into the pilots seat and fair sank the boot into the V6. I was fine with us bending the speedo needle at a constant 220 KPH (136 MPH) but had a bit of a nervous moment on the Renner Springs jump-up. The jump-up is a big sweeping off-camber right hander and with a road train coming in the opposite direction. It was bout this moment when he car started adhering the principle of physics and began to float into the opposite lane. I could see and sense Fluxy getting a bit anxious with keeping the car out of the oncoming bull bar. There was no panic or anything, just some gentle coaxing of the vehicle, through the corner and onto the straight. We come to find out later that the driver of the road train was actually our room mate and he tells us he was convinced that he had us in the grill.
We pull up at Renner Springs for a quick a quick feed and some fuel. We also managed to catch up with another of our Westies boys - Gary "Horse" Henningson. Not sure who's idea it was, but we thought we'd test out our freshly sign written "World Grog Tour" esky by loading it up with a carton of Green cans and kept heading north.
We dropped Hippy off in Katherine and noticed the three of us managed to knock off a carton of piss (24 beers) in 262 miles (422 kilometres). Must have been a hot day with that amount of evaporation I reckon. From there it was only a couple of hours and we were in Darwin, our state capitol.
Sitting around that evening and over a couple of beers (your surprised???) we calculated that we took 9¾ hours to travel 933 miles or 1501 kilometres. Now that's one hell of a start to a footy trip in anyones language.
• DARWIN (Northern Territory, AUS) to KUTA (Bali, IDN)
via DENPASAR (Lesser Sunda Islands, IDN)