Sunday 23 September – Waking to fine drizzle wasn’t what we hoped for this morning, but it didn’t last for long, and by the time we were packing up the van it just needed a bit of a wipe down, so not too bad at all.  It was probably about 8.15 when we pulled out of the park, and after our cars usual travel day breakfast of a big guzzle of petrol, we were on our way.

Driving north towards Norseman we came across lots and lots of quite large dams or lakes, many of which looked to have salt deposits around the edges.  I decided to look it up on the computer tonight to see if they were indeed salt lakes (Grant reckons it’s only white sand), but as we have no phone or internet coverage here tonight, that will have to wait.  There continued to be lots of canola and wheat properties and quite a lot of sheep.  We passed through a couple of places on the map – but there didn’t seem to be much evidence of a township – we  must have blinked going through Scaddan and Green Patch, but Salmon Gums was quite a settlement, having a school, a playground and a few houses and other buildings.

By the time we reached Norseman it was cuppa time, so after photographing their corrugated iron camels which feature in the centre of the roundabout as you enter town, we found caravan parking at the rear of the visitors centre and had our cuppas there.  There was an outback experience tour bus there from Albury with a load of grey nomads having morning tea, and we were wondering where they had been and which direction they were travelling.  As I was coming out of the toilet block I spoke to a couple of ladies from Sydney and I asked them if they were part of the bus group, but it seems they were the female half of two couples travelling together by car.  They seemed to be a bit confused about where they had been, as they said that the bus group had stayed at the same accommodation place as they did last night in Esperance, and the people were from all over the place.  And both them and the bus load were heading to Kalgoorlie today.  When I got back to the car and told Grant, he had been talking to a bloke from the bus tour who had told him that they had come from Kalgoorlie and were travelling to Esperance!!  But then I guess that bloke could have been the confused one!!

Some of the corrugated camels.

I took my turn at driving from Norseman onwards, and a couple of hours later we stopped for lunch at a roadside stop, then continued on to where we are now installed – Balladonia Roadhouse.    

Today we saw a mother emu with three or four emuets – quite cute as they were still at that stripey stage, and then excitement plus!!  We saw our first dingo of the trip.  Unfortunately it was quite flat, and on the side of the road – it was no more!  So we can’t now say we haven’t seen one – just that it was dead.

A glimpse of the Eyre Highway.

About ten km out of Balladonia we passed a couple of cyclists with little trailers on the back of their bikes and gave them a toot.  Grant snapped a picture of them as we were passing.  So when they pulled into the caravan park at the back of the roadhouse here I went and spoke to them and offered to email them the photo when they got home.  They were delighted with that, as they said that it isn’t possible to get photos of both of them together ‘en route’.  It turns out they are Del (a bloke) and Cindy (his wife) from NZ and are cycling from Perth to Adelaide.  They left Perth on September 1^st and have allowed two months to complete the trip.  She told me that when they started they could do about 50 km a day, and now they easily do 100.  They are probably about their early to mid 60’s, and did a cycling trip in France last year.  So later in the afternoon I got their email address and will send off the photo in due course.

Grant had noticed that the roadhouse sold cappuccinos, so after we had set up, over we went and he had is fix, and we browsed through a small museum here which is part of the roadhouse.  Balladonia hit the headlines worldwide in 1979 when it was showered with pieces of the US space station SkyLab as it fell to earth.  So there was a section in the museum about that, and a big chunk of the space station was on display.

By the time this blog gets an airing, you will probably have realised that we have no internet access, and if this keeps up right across the Nullarbor, we may just beat the news home!

I went over to the amenities block before tea for a shower, and it was very basic, to say the least.  The showers (there are 2 in both the mens and the womens blocks) look quite okay – lovely shower curtains, all tiled cubicles, but I’ll tell you what!! I could have peed faster than the water was coming out of the shower.  After running around the cubicle to get wet, the trickle of water turned cold, then came hot again a couple of times.  So tonight’s shower certainly was just a quick splash, and when Grant went for his a while later, he had the same experience.  And when I mentioned to the lady who came out of the other shower that I could have peed faster, she nearly wet herself laughing and said she couldn’t have described it better herself.

I miscalculated the distance of today’s drive in my planning.  I thought we were covering 445 km, but it was only about 390, so we enjoyed the afternoon.  As I’ve said before, we don’t intend to do massive mileage each day, so our next door neighbour from yesterday would be very disappointed that we didn’t take his advice and do 900 km today!  We intend to arrive home next Sunday bright eyed and bushy tailed and not as sleep deprived zombies!