Half day holiday

 

Monday 24 May 2021 – Half day holiday

Larry had done the gentlemanly thing and slept on the air mattress with a sleeping bag so that Jenny  could have his single bed in his unit.  Consequently neither of us slept very well as air mattresses are never fun and Jenny was too cold in the air conditioning and too worried about falling out of a single bed (when she is used to a king sized one) to sleep very well.

Larry headed off to work whilst it was still dark (and also cold and wet as the weather had closed in overnight) and Jenny managed to sleep on until about 7am.  Up and breakfasted and rang Larry who came back from work to drive me around to the van which we then drove back to the units and unhitched.  L headed on back to work again and Jen took the Jeep to refuel and then a trip to Woolies to stock the van with all the perishables.   It had been interesting to note that last night the whole carpark in front of the visitor centre, as well as the overflow down at the oval, had been chocablock with caravans but they had mostly driven away by the time I drove past this morning.   Back to the van and Jenny used all her spatial awareness skills to squeeze a trolley load of food into fridges and cupboards only to remember all of the stuff in Larry’s unit fridge that also had to be squeezed in!

Larry had sweet talked his bosses into letting him leave work at ‘lunchtime’ so he was back at the unit  a few minutes before midday.  A quick change for L (bye bye high viz for 7 weeks!) and we had the van hitched, unit keys dropped off and had hit the road by 12.30pm.

Just as we were congratulating ourselves on a quick getaway we realised we had hit Great Northern Highway just as an overwidth load passed the intersection heading north so we had a very slow trip out of town.  We probably could have walked faster!  Then it was three of four sets of roadworks heading north with all of the road shoulders being retarmacked.  Interesting to note they had also closed off all of the rest stops with signs saying “closed, please use next rest stop” except that when you got to the next rest stop it was also closed and had the same sign.  A quick text and FYI to Miranda whilst we had reception but hopefully most of the work will have been done by the time they drive through in a couple of weeks.

 

We decided to just drive as far as possible today to make a dent in the km’s up to Broome so basically just drove for six and a half hours with only a short stop at Auski (just long enough to a toilet break and for Jenny to fall over in the carpark in true Ben style – oh well, at least my calamity for the trip is already over and only a grazed knee to show for it) and another stop in Port Hedland to refuel.

We eventually made it to De Grey river campsite about 7ish and fortunately Jenny’s two major concerns about driving in the dark (one being hitting a cow wandering onto the road followed by arriving at a full campsite and not being able to find a spot) didn’t happen.  The roads were devoid of animal life and, although there were quite a few vans at De Grey, there was plenty of room for us and we quickly found a level spot away from other campers and soon had dinner cooking.  A quick meal of calamari on the hotplate tossed through a crunchy noodle salad went down a treat.

Although it had been cool and cloudy in Newman in the morning it had warmed up as we headed north and it was still in the low 20’s when we went to bed so we had all the windows open and the Sirroco fans whirring us to sleep about 9pm.