Port Headland - don't bother

We’re in for a few driving days, and yesterday was one of them. After another quick canoe we left Millstream-Chichester for the slow drive along the bumpy road to Port Headland. We had to have two stops to refill from jerry cans as we’d decided not to backtrack to Roeborne for fuel. It’s very handy to have the option with the jerry cans, but pretty stinky driving along with diesel scented hands. Luckily to fill the time on these driving days, apart from the nice scenery, we’ve started reading the last Harry Potter book, which I had been saving up. We’re encountering more and more road trains as we go, and really big ones – a lot of them around here have four carriages behind them, and we counted one with 82 wheels all up yesterday. Quite intimidating.

We only wanted to go to Port Headland to stay at a caravan park to wash clothes and ourselves, and that’s pretty much all we got. We spent a fortune at Coles, filled up the car and jerry cans, and squeezed into one of the last spots at the caravan park literally across the road from the airport, behind a servo. It’s not the most scenic of views and has bright lights left on all night, probably because the caravan park is being rebuilt at the moment so there’s holes everywhere, rubble and fences etc. The bathrooms certainly need redoing, and yet we got one of the last spots, and the two other caravan parks were booked out. Apart from grey nomads, most of it is mining people, as this place is full of demountable little cabins, which are so tiny they mustn’t have more than just a bed and loo if they’re lucky, but absolutely packed. As we got here late and had a couple of loads of laundry to do, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner at the pub on the other side of the servo that the owner mentioned, and which we thought might have cheap steak and a beer. We forgot of course that this is a mining town, and although it certainly wasn’t swish and everyone was wearing construction work clothes and/or thongs, they were still paying $40 for a steak. Having said that, at least it was a nice steak. We’re going to leave as early as we can basically today, and hot foot it to somewhere on 80 mile beach, looking for nicer surroundings.