We Are Off

MONDAY 11 JUNE 2019

A bit of a rough night as we didn’t quite work out the air conditioning in the chalet and it was a bit too warm and stuffy to be comfortable.  L got up pre dawn and headed off to work and J stayed put for another hour or so before getting up and donning her ‘work’ attire. 

L headed back to collect me and the stuff from the chalet at about 7.30am and then headed out to Yarnima power station to visit Larry’s work.  Met some of Larry’s workmates – some old familiar faces and some new and then donned hard hat etc for a quick tour of the ‘plant’.  It was a bright sunny morning but quite chilly so plenty of steam escaping from the towers.  Was very interesting seeing the gas and steam turbines up close and got an explanation on how and why the water runs around the plant cooling and heating and steaming things up to make power.

 After about an hour, however, the interest levels had been reached maximum and L took me to his work mate  Ryan’s place to pick up the car and caravan which we then took back to the units (by now some pen pusher in Perth had signed off the paperwork to let the guys back into their units!!).  L headed back to work and Jen spent the morning moseying around Newman – dropping off the keys to the chalet, putting petrol in the car and doing the grocery shopping at Woolies.  Most annoyingly, the shopping list I had prepared weeks ago in Perth so that I bought the food required for the pre-prepared menu plan went missing (I suspect it’s floating around the Caltex somewhere) so I ended up just buying lots of whatever looked good in terms of meat, veg, fruit and bread and will have to write a new menu plan to suit.

L texted to say he would finish work by 3pm so treated myself to a late lunch at Dome and read the paper and had some down time.  After all, I AM on holiday!  At approximately 3.05pm (keen to leave work much?!) L was walking through the door of the unit and stripping off the high vis and not long afterwards we had the van hitched and were headed out of town. 

It wasn’t until we made it past the turn off to Yarnima that Larry decided he was finally actually really on holiday!!  Made it to Mt Robinson rest stop before dusk and wouldn’t have wanted to get there any later as there were already about 15 cars and vans parked up.  Not a very attractive setting where we parked and the flies were very friendly so we sat in the van to eat our heated up dinners (thanks Kurra Camp!) and then read and relaxed until another very early night.