June 9 (Day 398) - Marree to Wilmington

June 9 is the day we expected to finish our trip, however the best-laid plans of mice and men so often go astray!

Sunrise

Our camp just out of Marree

7am outside Marree - the cold is well and truly upon us!

7 degrees!

June 8 (Day 397) - Oodnadatta to Marree

 Oodnadatta is a pretty small town, similar in feel to Birdsville. We dropped into the Pink Roadhouse for a coffee and a bit of food. Fuel was about $2 per litre so we were thankful we filled up all the jerry cans at $1.52/L in Marla.

The Pink Roadhouse, Oodnadatta

Inside the Pink Roadhouse - included a decent enough sized store

June 6-7 (Day 395-396) - Alice Springs (NT) to Oodnadatta (SA)

 We enjoyed the Memorial Meeting on Sunday with Nat and his family in Alice Springs, along with a Sis Lisa who joined us for the day. We tuned into Cumberland's meeting where Bro Trevor Gore exhorted on the lessons we can learn from the rebuilding work of the wall of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. After that we enjoyed a roast lamb lunch (thanks Nat!) and packed up.

Our camp in Alice Springs!

Lunchtime - Nat, Lisa, Keelan, Bek, Roha, Jude, Elora, Ollie, Matt, Mim, Greg

May 21 - June 5 (Day 379-394) - Kununurra to Alice Springs (via the Tanami Rd)

Kununurra

We stayed in Kununurra for a few days. We had one night at the Hidden Valley caravan park. Next morning we found one of the caravan tyres had a slow puncture. The tyres were getting very low anyway and I had been debating changing them in Kununurra (expensive) vs taking a risk and hoping they'd limp us back to Adelaide (cheaper). The puncture tipped the scales in favour of replacing the tyres so we got four new tyres put on at the Bridgestone dealer. They weren't actually too expensive, I think about $210 per tyre compared to $180 or so for a comparable tyre in Perth.

New tyres for the van!

May 1 - 8 - Sherlock River to Broome (via Port Hedland, Roebuck Plains and Dampier Peninsula) (Day 359 - 367)

830km

Saturday 1 May - Sherlock River to 80 Mile Beach

We enjoyed a lovely quick morning swim in the Sherlock River. As the water was quite murky we didn't want to hang around too long to see if there were any crocs. :) 

Sherlock River

April 12 - 14 (Day 340 - 342) - Newman to Karijini rest area

 Monday 12 April

We spent the night about 4 kms just north of Newman so that we could come back easily in the morning to go the visitors Centre to get a key so that we could empty our porta loo. This is the only place that we've needed a key for a dump point. Anyway after emptying and filling up the water tanks I did some food shopping. This is the last big shop we will come across until maybe Exmouth or later. Once we'd packed it all away we found a cozy spot to have our hot dog lunch.

  

Suburban streets in Newman

April 12-14

 Just a quick update before we go out of signal for the next few days. Using the free wifi at the rest stop on the corner of Great Northern Highway and Karijini Drive.

April 12 we headed into Karijini, drove 80km to get to the entrance only to find a sign to say the gorge walks were closed due to impending rain. The same happened with the next gorge we tried. So we ended up going back to the free camp.

April 13 was raining all day so we were stuck in the van. Played Monopoly if I recall with Jude.

April 14 we'd hoped would be better. It had some patches of no rain but it was still raining in parts of the day. The van had a couple of water leaks so in the evening we spent about two hours shifting it under a shelter at the free camp. And then it stopped raining.

Tomorrow April 15-17 we go into Dales Gorge Campground in Karijini when the weather is supposed to have cleared up. We intend to do several gorge walks. Then on Sunday 18th the plan is to drive out towards Coral Bay. We stay there the 19th and 20th, and then head up towards Exmouth.

Hopefully by Coral Bay we should have signal back again.

God bless!
- Greg and Mim

April 10 (Day 338) - Mount Magnet to Meekatharra

240km

As our morning is becoming, it started with checking the cyclone warning to make sure we were still heading in the right direction (or more to the point, that Cyclone Seroja hadn't decided to head in OUR direction!). All looks good so far.

While we are inland a fair way, you can see from the photo below the sky is still heavy with cloud. We haven't had a sunny day for a couple of days now and we've had spots of rain too although not a lot of it.

 

Grey skies. Thanks Seroja!

Morning coffee

We packed up the site fairly promptly, but once again were cursed by flies! Oh they were horrible - just like before, they get in your eyes, nose, mouth, ears, between your fingers! Yuk!

Lord of the flies

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.

March 26-31 - end of stay in Perth

 Well our stay in Perth has almost come to an end! We came here expecting to stay for about six weeks and ended up staying for 20! Wow, that's four and a half months and we've had such a lovely time!

A few highlights of the last week:

Caravan:

We bought another spare set of springs for the caravan just in case we break another spring on our last leg of our journey. They're pretty heavy so I was trying to get rid of excess weight, and decided to install the two brand new suspension rockers instead of carrying them around as spares. The centre rocker has a grease nipple in the end to keep the rocker lubricated, but when I'd tried to the grease had gotten dried up and gone really hard which had probably contributed to the wear. I had to pull most of the suspension apart to get the rockers out so I could clean out the dried hardened grease so the rockers could be lubricated again. On the old rocker, I found the steel bush on the centre pivot point, and the two side nylon bushes which I'd replaced in Darwin, were all showing signs of wear.

The old centre rocker. Notice the wear at the top of the centre pivot point, and at the bottom of the side pivot points.

The centre pivot bolt. See that dark dot in the middle of the shiny patch? That's supposed to be a hole which grease comes out of! It had gone rock hard!

 

Jan 14 - 15 (Day 329-330) - Albany to Esperance

 

620km

Thursday 14 January

 Today was a slow morning getting some work and school work done. 

Lunch at Wellstead

Then we hit the road towards Ravensthorpe. We were hoping to get to a caravan park to be able to do some washing and have a shower but most parks are busy this time of year so we had to think outside the box a little. So I looked on Wikicamps for rest stops that had showers available (like we did when we first arrived in Esperance last November) and spotted one at Wellstead which was on the way to Ravensthorpe.

 On the way up the road was closed and took us on quite a detour before heading back to the main highway but at least we were still heading where we wanted.

We all throughly enjoyed our shower! Oh, warm, clean and smelling like violets and daffodils! :D

One way we get a bit of clothes washing
done while on the road

Washing on the road

I also got Greg to fill a bucket half full of warm water to use in our 'caravan washing machine', which is just a 20L mayonnaise pail. This is a tip we learned from other travellers and gets you by. It's pretty easy to use - put your washing powder in and water, dump your clothes in and then sit it on the front (or rear) of your caravan. In our case it lives in the front tool box. The bumping along the road acts as an agitator, so when you arrive at your next destination the clothes are roughly washed. You then change over the water and rinse a few times an then put back in the tool box for the next bit of the travel to shake around and rinse nicely; then when you get to camp simply wring out and hang up.

Since we had used the showers that were free we thought to help them be able to maintain these free facilites we would buy something from the shop. As we got into the shop the boys spotted this cabinet full of matchbox cars. They were in absolute awe.

An incredible matchbox car collection at the Wellstead roadhouse!

Today seemed to be the day of road works. Actually this part of the highway they seem to be doing a lot of work on. Maybe widening it or something? I'm not sure but we were sitting at this stop for at least 5-10 minutes.

This is the Wheatbelt region of WA, and they've now finished harvest so most fields just have the stubble left.

Sun on the stubble - after harvest in the Wheatbelt, WA

Ravensthorpe

We made it to Ravensthorpe by about 4.45pm where we needed to pick up a parcel at the post office by 5pm, which Mum had sent down from Perth as it had arrived the day after we left for this southern part of our trip. It was a new solar regulator as the other one apparently wasn't working properly. 

We had travelled through Ravensthorpe on the way from Esperance to Perth preparing for our lockdown, so we started to recognise a few spots from here on.

Then we found a lovely little spot just south west of Ravensthorpe for the night. The weather has been so bitterly cold the last little while since getting down towards Albany which is a bit unusual for us as we've been in the warmer parts of the country for ages. Only needed our jumpers a few times here and there but down here we have needed them pretty much every day since about Augusta. But I must say it is nice in the evening when it comes to bedtime and you can snuggle under the quilt because it's cold. Much more bearable than sweltering and not being able to sleep because you are so hot.

Our camp for the night, about 10km south of Ravensthorpe

Friday 15 January

We headed from our rest stop down to Hopetoun to have a bit of a look around and hopefully drive along the coast towards Esperance.

We spotted a bakery on the way through and just had to have a little something. The boys had a quick play on the playground and then we went for a short walk down the street to the bakery and got some goodies to share between us all.

The coastline and beaches look so lovely but because it's so cold we haven't gone for any more swims.

Greg has been hunting and hunting online to try to find a bull bar for the Pajero. You'd be aware we hit a kangaroo on Cape York Peninsula July last year and we're going to be getting it repaired in Perth before we leave, but we're hoping to install a bull bar instead of just getting a new front bumper. It's been very hard to find something exactly right, and he made a few further unsuccessful phone calls while we were having morning tea.

Beautiful shoreline east of Hopetoun

From Hopetoun there was a road running along the coast for a while before it rejoined the main road further along, but we thought it might be nice to have some scenery of the coast so opted to take that road. We pumped up the tyres at a service station (we'd let them down a little while ago for a dirt road), then carried along the road out east for a while and got some nice views of the coastline, however the road was reasonably skinny and after a while it turned into dirt! Having just pumped up the tyres we weren't inclined to drop them back down for a smoother ride, so after a minute or two's vacillation decided to chicken out and head back to Hopetoun then back up to the main road. Times like these are why we've said how good information centres are, and this is the price you pay for ignoring your own advice!

Along the way we spotted a blue tongue lizard which Matthew went and rescued off the road and we let it road the car for a few minutes and then release back into the bush.

Along the road from Hopetoun back to Ravensthorpe a few farmers have put these large pieces of art around the place. This is just one of them but there were about another 10 pieces of art that were a bit further down other roads which we didn't go down. 

On our way to Esperance I made a few phones calls to caravan parks but every one of them was fully booked out so next best thing is looking on the satellite map and spotting bush tracks and finding somewhere we can squirrel ourselves away in that's free and to ourselves. We found one just 12 kms North West of Esperance and we'll stay here for 2 nights. There's not heaps of phone signal but enough to get some work done.

Our camp near Esperance

-- Mim and Greg

Jan 8 - 9 (Day 325-326) - Tuart to Darradup (Milyeannup State Forest)

280km

Friday 8 January

Last night we were joined by quite a few roof top campers and camper vans of various different nationalities. We couldn't quite believe how close they decided to park next to us at such a late time but thankfully they didn't seem to bother us with noise or music, only their engine running for quite some time both when they arrived and before they left in the morning. 

Today was a pretty unproductive day in terms of progress along our trip (spoiler alert: we ended up staying tonight at the same place we stayed last night!). The intention had been to look around Busselton and then head down towards Augusta. However there are NO free camps at all between Busselton and Augusta, so we knew we had to head off fairly early in order to cover all that route. Sadly we slept in a bit so didn't get on our way until after 10am so things weren't looking great!