En route to Karajini

The big prawn outside Exmouth

Have just remembered that we promised to be at Uluru on 2^nd July so I really have to ring them today and try and move it. I was surprised that we managed to move our booking for Broome after having to book so far ahead. I rang up a while ago and they took 10 days to work it out but still managed to move it to the middle of July, I guess other people cancel all the time too since it’s so hard to judge when you’ll arrive somewhere. We were woken this morning by a loud chorus of birds which was nice, there’s all these river gums they were sitting in alongside the Beasley river, which is currently only a puddle. We were camping a distance away from the toilet at the site so had to use our own, and discovered that we probably should have emptied it after we’d used it for a few days at Warroora Station. It hasn’t been a problem in the past, leaving it for a while, while we’ve been in cooler weather, but obviously when it gets this warm and if we leave it sitting for a while some serious fermenting goes on and when Daniel had to use it last night it really stank the tent out. First job to do when we reach Tom Price! Hope you enjoyed discussing that paragraph mum and Alain.

We were hoping to go on the tour of the big mine at Tom Price today and rang up as soon as we had reception, found out the bus left at 10am so we had to really gun it to try and get there – on a dirt road which had dips and crests like a roller coaster so we managed to get airborne quite a few times in an effort to make the bus. Luckily it was a well graded road, but unfortunately we missed the bus by only 10 minutes. We then did a bit of shopping, got fuel, went to fill up with water, and discovered that both ends of our the hose into our water tank were broken! It must have been all of that bumping at great speed on the dirt road in the morning – and wasn’t even worth it since we didn’t even make the tour! I’m just happy that we discovered it before heading into Karajini (where there’s no water). Still it was a bit of a dilemma with bits come apart and other bits snapped, but Nick was a trooper and fixed both of them while the kids played at the skate park and I blogged and made lunch. The only catch was that he drove off to the hardware store with the cap to the water tank off and sitting on the side of the wheel arch… so of course it fell off. So I spent about half an hour retracing his route around the town (which wasn’t very far luckily) and couldn’t believe that I actually found it, 50m from where he started, which means that it stayed on the whole time he drove around the streets, only to fall off when he did a big loop to come back and park next to the water tank again. Very happy to find it anyway, and all up it only delayed us a couple of hours, and we were lucky that our friends went on ahead to the national park to reserve us a campsite. The national park is still another hour from Tom Price and it’s a lovely drive through the mountains which are all red dirt and big rocks, with some white barked gums sporadically spread over them along with scrub around the place. Lovely colours. We arrived at about 4pm, tired but relieved and ready for a beer with the Ralhs. It’s a nice campsite, although very rocky red dirt on the ground, and being a national park, no fires. It’s also only a few minutes’ drive from quite a lot of walks so that makes it easier to get out and do things without getting up at crack of dawn – the thought of being able to set up for a couple of days and just venture out in the car is really nice.