Bogged

FRIDAY 5 JULY 2019

It had turned into quite a humid night and when we awoke in the morning it was to grey skies, fog and everything covered in so much dew it sounded like rain with the trees dripping on to the awnings of those caravans below.

It made for a novel experience of packing up with everything either wet or being adhered to by wet grass and lots all of our dry dusty things quickly becoming wet, muddy things.  I think Kate must have brought some of the winter moisture from Perth with her!

Took us a while to pack up and find places for the extra things we now have and the extra room we require in the car with a third person but still on the road a little after 9am.  We headed north on the Cape Leveque which was paved up until the Willie Creek Pearl Farm road but then turned to red, corrugated sand.  We bumped along and Kate got her first taste of corrugations and quickly decided that she was glad she only had to put up with them for a couple of hours and not for weeks like we had just done on the Gibb.

Apparently this whole road will be bitumenised by the end of next year and it wasn’t long before we came across evidence of the work being undertaken with  a whole new road being constructed 10 metres  to the side of the one we were on.  They had also graded a lot of our road too so the road did get a bit smoother and we cruised north without too much bother except when we passed cars coming the other way as the road has been graded so much that the piles of sand either side of the road are nearly as high as the car so that it is like a cliff either side of the road you have to watch when squeezing past another car.

The top half of the Cape Leveque road is already bitumenised and we were back on this for a blissful 30km or so from before Beagle Bay and up to the turnoff for Middle Lagoon.  Here there were a number of cars/caravans stopped to let down their tyres but we had already done so in Broome so sailed past them.  All good for 10km or so and then we encountered cars coming in the opposite direction and had to move to the side of the road just at a point where the road narrowed and there was thick deep sand (like beach sand except red) and we managed to bog car and van.  All of a sudden there was a drama as the cars going the other way couldn’t get past and the cars and vans behind us started to block up behind us.  Larry leapt out and let the tyres down even further (as did the guy in the van below us),   the guy in the car next to us helping and other people leaping from their cars also to do the same to their tyres.

Letting the tyres down further did the trick and a bit of wiggling between us and the van behind us and the cars coming the other way and we were all on our way again.  Of course the road then widened out and hardened up so if we had only met those oncoming cars another kilometre down the track there wouldn’t have been an issue.   By the time we pulled up at the office at middle lagoon it had been a 3 and a half hour trip instead of a 2 and a half hour trip and we then spent another half hour to hour trying to get the van level on our sloping, sandy site.  So all in all, a rather tiring and stressful day and certainly no way to introduce Kate to the enjoyment of caravaning and camping!!

Never mind, we finally got everything set up and then K and J made hot

dogs for lunch and we all sat down with food and drink and looking at the ocean and started to feel much better.

We spent the rest of the afternoon with Larry pottering around the van and Kate and Jenny exploring the beach and dabbling our toes in the ocean.  We then played pre dinner Uno and then organised steak sandwiches for dinner.  We then played Up and Down the River (aka Oh Hell) over hot drinks before deciding to make an early night of it.