Tuesday 28 August – Well we have some phone and internet coverage today, so hopefully we can catch up with you all again.  We left Auski at about 8 this morning, and about 70 kms along the way we took the turnoff into Dales Gorge and drove 18 km to the carpark.  It was a short walk to a spot where we could look down on the Fortescue Falls which was lovely.  There wasn’t a lot of water coming over the falls, but it was still really nice.  The gorge itself is very deep.  Then we went for a reasonable walk along the rim till we came to a lookout spot where three gorges meet, so that was lovely too.

A bird’s eye view of Fortescue Falls.

We continued on the further distance to Tom Price, driving through beautiful hills/mountains in surprisingly bright and varied colours.  It was just lovely country to be driving through, and to my mind the prettiest of the national parks from that point of view. 

Some of the lovely drive today.

By midday we were here at the Tom Price Tourist Park, which is situated at the base of Mt Nameless – the highest mountain in Western Australia at a height of 1128 mtrs.  The park is very nice and has got very busy tonight.

Once here we got pretty well set up, and I was in the van just finishing up what has to be done there when a lizard scampered from behind something I moved and hurtled out of sight.  Of course I loudly alerted Grant (even the man in the next van came round to see what was going on), who simply said: ‘Just as well it wasn’t a snake!’  That was no help, so Grant came in and took everything off the spare bed (where it had taken refuge) while I waited outside waiting to see if it dropped out onto the ground from anywhere – but it didn’t.  Grant said it was darting around on the mattress of the spare bed, but he couldn’t get and it disappeared SOMEWHERE!  He’s telling me that I’ll probably wake up in the morning with it looking at me from the pillow!

After set up we went the couple of km into town for Grant’s latest bloodtest (all good), went to the visitors centre and got details of tomorrows mine tour, and we’ve also managed to get on the full day gorge tour on Thursday, so we are very happy about that.  We picked up a couple of things at the supermarket, then Grant was able to book the car in for a service tomorrow afternoon (we’ve hit the 10,000km for the trip yesterday).

As it was rather warm again today we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the shade outside the van just being holiday makers, which is a pretty good thing to do.