April 8 (Day 337) - Geraldton to Mullewa

170km

We had a reasonable night sleep. There was a fair bit of traffic going past as we were just in a roadside rest area and I woke up about 6am but went back and slept until about 9!

Current projected track of Cyclone Seroja
(at 11pm 9 April)

Cyclone Update

Pretty quickly we checked the cyclone update only to find there was now a third cyclone joining the party off the north west of the WA coast! This interaction makes it difficult to plot where it may go. However it was firming up that the coastal regions would be terrible places to be. We wondered if we could have made it up to Shark Bay to get out to Steep Point (the western-most mainland point) and then cut inland, but the roads all looked pretty rough. We also had the broken caravan safety chain to sort out. So we decided to head back to Geraldton to get that sorted out, and then head inland towards the Great Northern Highway. One option which is looking the most promising, in terms of the projected cyclone path and our own limited time, is to head up to Karijini National Park first (which is roughly due east of Coral Bay and due South of Port Hedland), then come across to Coral Bay and Exmouth after the cyclone's past. This will allow us to basically mirror the cyclone's current projected track.

 

We drove down to Geraldton and got the van fixed up with two nice new chains.

Picked up some new windscreen wiper blades, and then headed east out through the Wheatbelt. 

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. The drive from Geraldton east towards Mt Magnet took us along the imaginatively-named 'Geraldton-Mount Magnet Road'. This region is part of the WA Wheatbelt, so as we saw further south the road is flanked with wheat fields. At this time of year they're still showing stubble although some looked like they had been ploughed and presumably reseeded recently. As usual it's a pretty boring landscape - nothing but flat open pasture with rows or clumps of trees here and there. It's not somewhere I would come for a picturesque sightseeing visit, at least not until the Wildflower season around the late winter / spring.

We stopped about 25km before Mullewa in a free camp. I had a go at doing some work on one of the caravan legs, seeing if I could add the original longer leg, part of which broke in Ceduna, onto the replacement which we found was shorter. Had no success though, despite an hour or so's efforts. The worst thing about this area were the FLIES! Oh they were so annoying! Little things, but lots of them and so insistent on flying into your face, eyes, ears, pretty well any orifice they can find! Trust me, it didn't make trying to do delicate work on the van leg any easier!

Working on the caravan leg. Thank goodness
we bought a battery angle grinder in Perth!

We were blessed with an amazing sunset though!

 

We have already felt some of the effects of the cyclone. The weather has been warmer and the sky fairly cloudy, with a few spots of rain.

-- Greg